§ 2/2/2018–­♣ Racism takes shape where power and bigotry meet. So it follows then that ethnic cleansing works the same pattern. It’s precisely that spot on which power and bigotry meet and it’s precisely since that’s the place where racism emerges, that all political processes beginning there are doomed to fail and the process of immigration reform, however well planned, is itself doomed to lapse into a state of ethnic cleansing.

Like any political process, immigration reform takes the personal character and sway of its progenitor and lately that’s the one and only Donald J. Trump. In consequence, Trump is that precise spot where power and bigotry meet and that precise spot where racism rears its head and given Trump’s vile personal character, that precise spot where American ethnic cleansing finally comes to us in spades, where appallingly ethnic cleansing Trump style comes about.

Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office. The President wields tremendous power at home and around the world. Sadly, he’s proven himself a thick-skinned bigot. His menacing bias can’t help but taint the president’s influence, poisoning all he does and yes, all he purports to do. There are many across the globe who tend to take a cue or plan a path scorched now by our Head-of-State’s unveiled bigotry.

Trump’s a man who pitched in front of the whole world that by and large Mexican immigrants constitute rapists and drug dealers, ceding that only some of the race are truly good people.

Trump’s a man who failed to denounce the head of a white nationalist group who led an obvious white supremacist rally near the White House, who co-opted the president’s casual stance toward racism, who heralded his intolerance of minorities including his aversion to some immigrants in a speech he commenced with the words “Hail Trump,” just oozing anti-Semitism, drooling racist sentiment and even soliciting “peaceful ethnic cleansing ” all of it met with loud cheers and a host of fervent Nazi salutes from his rabid following.

Trump’s a man who saw another white supremacist rally, this one staged in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, one precipitating the racist-fueled killing of a woman when a rally member plowed his car straight into a counter-protest group, peaceable people from the ranks of whom nineteen others were hospitalized and still our president told the world “there were good people on either side.”

Trump’s a man who once announced a particular judge could not preside impartially over a court case that involved the president simply because the said judge proved to be of Mexican descent.

Trump’s a man who independently busted a move to ban all Muslims from admittance to the United States, a man who’s committed countless other obvious acts of racism and acquiesced to many more beyond his immediate orbit.

Trump’s a man who’s an arbiter of world-class proportions who, showing disgust at a bipartisan immigration reform meeting, labelled Haiti and fifty-four African nations “sh__hole countries.” Bigotry plagues much of the rank and file but there it’s proven a rather cloaked and insidious racism involving few in seats of power.  Spread from perches of power of course, racism is prone to exert far more influence over populations.

When the president said “sh__hole countries,” Trump apologists cropped up all across the breadth of the USA. A select group of Republicans utterly rushed to Trump’s defense claiming the president used the colloquialism sh__house,  not sh__hole, like to parse the former term is a somehow less racist slur than the latter or certain nouns fare better than others in league with the word sh__. Sheese, Crikey, Gadzooks! Only in Trump’s White House!

Trump’s a man who in trying to seal the US-Mexican border, coldly initiated, justified and presided over separation of innocent immigrant children from their parents, some with very little chance of ever being reunited. He saw those children locked in cages, many sick and unwashed, without adequate medical care and hygiene provisions. It’s obvious this loathsome tack was basically inhuman, wholly averse to the great American ethic of human rights and social justice begrudged immigrants simply because they weren’t American citizens.

Donald Trump’s official power only serves to elevate his bigotry to the dire level of racism. In the same aspect, Trump’s power as President of the United States only serves to catapult that selfsame racism beyond the pale to the problematic realm of the extreme, to the highest attainable bar, to the top, to the absolute pinnacle of racism and Donald Trump himself to a spot as America’s premier racist.  What could auger any worse for governance of a free and enlightened society than a commander-in chief who’s racist-in-chief as well?

The latest immigration reform began with Donald Trump and hence mimes the dubious character and sway of Donald Trump. Since Trump’s a bigot who wields the nation’s highest power, his brand of immigration reform is way out of bounds. It’s a gross perversion of immigration reform as a matter of fact. It’s racism incarnate that approaches ethnic cleansing.

With a bigot like Trump in the lead, the phrase immigration reform becomes nothing less than code for ethnic cleansing, that widespread atrocity that’s tantamount to genocide, that grim, inevitable consequence of uttermost racism.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

♣ 9-18-2017∼Last night, fresh from a stint as the unrelenting, bowl-faced and demonstrable liar who used to drag the American free press through the mire, Sean Spicer managed a cameo spot at the annual Emmy Awards. With a not too biting spoof of himself, Spicer, one-time press secretary there reprised his role as Vice Liar-in-Chief to Donald Trump.

A cute trick, even Spicer lapped it up, though many were not amused and found in bad taste the attempt to quickly normalize the disingenuous Trump stooge on the questionable if quite obliging platform of an acting awards program. The odd bit opened with a piquant send up of Sean Spicer’s first lie in office, just a lame dodge, a cheap trick, a flagrant attempt to foist on the viewing public that conspicuously smaller crowd at Trump’s inauguration as the biggest inauguration turnout ever. Clearly, Sean never caught wind of that quaint if pithily relevant little modern-day invention called the camera.

Many watching the Emmies have been scandalized to see a man lately chosen poster boy for national disgrace so casually celebrated, reduced to a mere political hack, his misdeeds diminished on national TV but I for one say, why not? Another shameless henchman shrunk to lies and deceit in the wake of blind ambition, just a cad who in a fit of ignorance once anointed Nazi concentration camps holocaust centers, Sean Spicer, much like George Goebbels, stayed true to the cause and in the mold of Adolf Eichmann he “vass only follovink orderss.”

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

§ ♣ 11-9-16, The Day After Election Day

Donald Trump is president of the United States today. While for winners most elections offer hope and celebration, they are seldom cause for worse response than pique from those who lose. The case of Trump is outside the norm however. Republicans seem elated with their triumph here and there and yet the choice of Trump is fraught with apprehension and dismay by a multitude on either side of the aisle.

After all, Trump’s a very temperamental man with narcissistic tendencies and irrepressible egocentric urges, boasting no obvious moral guide, no discernable code of ethics, no resolve that manifests remotely like principles which intrude on his little bag of tricks. He’s got no clear and cogent political philosophy and airs little savvy, little character, little grace, little restraint, little grasp of the chair to which he accedes.

Trump’s a veritable wild card. He’s totally unpredictable. He’s just as prone to fiendishness as good, just as predisposed to harm as help, just as apt to break things as make reparation. It’s been said Trump’s a bull who packs his own china shop given our new leader’s weird knack for self-sabotage. He’s his own worst enemy. I worry, is he ours?

On that score, it seems about fifty percent of the US voting public yesterday threw all caution to the wind, thwarted principle, shunned fine American values and frightfully, impetuously, undermined the dignity and integrity of a nation by electing Donald Trump, key dignity and integrity which, not unlike freedom put wrong, we’ll be hard-pressed to ever put right again.

In an arbitrary bid to put any low, two-bit authoritarian punk in our command just as long as that goon guaranteed to be their own goon and even though the greatness of our venerable democracy languish, Trump’s people  took a giant leap of chance. They jeopardized the safety and security of a nation, this warm, brilliant, awe-inspiring  lodestar of liberty, font of hope for social justice and equality, America and for what, another empty vow of broad political change, a vow purported to be kept but if needed, kept only under the volatile and vitriolic agency of lies, slander, racism, hatred and division?

Donald Trump has shown the world exactly who he is by his impudent behavior of the last eighteen months or so. Nonetheless, the American working middle class has brought to highest office this demonstrably cold, brash, ignorant old codger, this cheap cad of faint and dubious principles, this scoundrel of excruciatingly weak moral fiber.

Trump fans have compromised the Oval with a boldfaced slanderer, philanderer, panderer to racists and to bigots, loyal partner to misogynists and xenophobes, shameless source of transparent lies, ad hominem, conspiracy theories, sophistry and mud-slinging rhetoric.

They’ve designated undisputed leader of the free world a great preening narcissist, a raging western chauvinist, inveterate snob, bloating braggart, arch authoritarian, a dogma-drooling demagogue, divisive rabble-rouser, a devout fear-monger, hater-elite and contemptuous advocate for the deeply personal, supra-professional savaging of friend, enemy, rival and detractor alike, brutal predator, great white breast-thumping stalker of the frail, ubiquitous, ever-amenable doe-eyed scapegoat.

Where is honor? Where is reason? Where is insight? Where is any odd feature that resembles common sense? Where’s our erstwhile loyalty to righteousness and truth? Where’s our vanishing respect what’s noble, just, refined? Are there any of these disappearing virtues worth having, worth reviving, reinstating, reclaiming in this frivolous new epoch of disposable resolve?

Are they all just the outmoded, cornball, silly putty values of a pencil-necked geek like me and all the other neuro-typical mediocrities abroad. Are we nuts to want abstracted  things like safety and security, like truth, justice, freedom and equality? Are we mad to want the glue of strong conviction that can hold these wisps together, lend them worth, show them love, keep them alive?

Truth, virtue, freedom, justice, conscience, nobility. All of these originate in nebulous array. In the mind all are mute, sheer, remote, intangible. Are any less essential for their stealth? Are the fruits of the amorphous just words, meager terms with which we designate or broach the unreal or do they constitute prototypes we scrutinize, understand, flesh out, fabricate, refine and protect. Humans entertain the most ingenious thoughts, then convert them into mighty institutions. We appreciate glorious ideas and their progeny. We know too that none are etched in stone.

They’re hazy things we render concrete, mere thoughts wrought tangible, 3D, real, extant by the miracle of human ingenuity. They’re hooey come to life, the fondest hopes, wishes, dreams and falderal with which we plot and undertake our most fabulous structures, our most intricate machinery, our government, our businesses, economy, technology, our streamlined electronic marvels. They’re that with which we speak our language, plan our days, cook our meals, show our love and bear our true intentions. They’re that with which we guarantee human rights and social justice, that with which the genuine, the provident, the Un-Trump strive on regularly and arduously to govern.

I wonder, do the Trumpers understand ingenuity or the knack we share for making real the unreal, for breathing precious life into our most incredible thoughts, into our highest aspirations, transcendent ideals which for more than two centuries have elevated, strengthened and protected us, that mystical and quintessential fusion of thought, faith, action, resolution and pragmatism curiously catalyzed by courage, poise, vision and integrity?

Thoughts, ideas, truths and ideals are born of mere fuzz within the boundaries of our quick and fertile brains. They demand an iron will to make them whole and keep them real. It’s ironic then that we whom somewhat dense and too pragmatic Donald Trump sees as dreamers, suckers, losers now urge that all these grand abstractions keep a place of permanence in our lives, be preserved, fostered, backed and guaranteed against the odds of being hijacked, garbled, co-opted or manipulated, claimed for use in power plays, partisanship or political gain, dragged around and chafed until they’re unfit for service.

So we cling to our ideals and aspirations, hopes and dreams of some locale where basic egalitarian principles can thrive, each reified and reinforced by our noblest institutions, first plans for which were spun in the potent mist of the human mind. We cleave to these crazy, idealistic things we can’t see or feel but think we might strive to make more real, might distill and then bequeath to our descendants and to theirs exponentially and on and anon. Are we dreamers? Are  we suckers? Are we losers? Donald Trump would tell the world we are and then chortle.

Yea, right, we freedom-lovers, helpless fools that we are, all agog in some stultifying fantasy world, expend our every waking hour in false hope, hauling along through hill and dale this ostentatious wishing well, stopping once in a while only to search our pockets, squint our eyes, chant impassioned supplications, toss our tiny silver coins aloft and clenching whitened fists await reprieve from some delusory social injustice or trumped up Republican imprudence?

Not quite but in the jaded minds of cynical conservatives we’ve done some other things considered equally absurd as on the other hand, Trump consumes his time in the service of practical things like honoring truth, uniting citizens, aiding American institutions, easing the plight of the marginalized and disinherited, buttressing all but the most adverse of democrats, news media, egalitarians, blacks, Latinos, women, those who tangle or disagree with him, those who buck lies and conspiracy theories and the huge contingent of lazy, shiftless losers who exist outside the insular realm of affluence.

We lovers of freedom believe in the special merits which tend to support and sustain democracy like honor, respect, commitment, grace and integrity. We believe in the priceless benefits of a government leaving no one behind. Such credences are based upon some pretty abstruse ideas but then ideas just as real and utterly viable as we choose to make them. Sad that Trump and our other detractors no longer make them so. Sadder they’ve given up and sold them out.

Do we freedom-lovers scheme and plot mischief in order to flout a broken system whereby no appeal to decency is heard? No, not us, though throngs took the streets in a licit, disconcerted grievance against our new commander’s injudicious win. The bulk of us, dogged by the dubious choice of  Trump, are quite distraught and disappointed midst the sobering realization that for four years we’re stuck with Donald Duck behind the wheel however we merely sigh a whimper of dissention and regret, fall to grief and as we loll about lamenting our egregious loss, dread the downright orgy of decadence to come.

Where’s America? Where’s that caring, generous land I thought I knew? Where’s the heart, the warmth, the usual compassion? Where’s the comity? Where’s the consummate benevolence ? Where’d they go? Where’s our long-established good will, our natural inclination toward the welcoming of strangers, that good old-fashioned Yankee hospitality at work once, carving out the legend of a nation? Are these weaknesses, the over-indulgence autocrats scorn? More likely they’re the strength, growth, humanity and empowerment only vigilant Americans employ. Where’d they go and where’s that even scarcer vigilant American? 

Have they perished, after all, under that contumelious overload of pre-conceived notions, rife suspicion, grave mistrust, rank prejudice and rabid indignation heating fast since the Great Immigration of the early Twentieth Century and finally boiling over now as Donald Trump stokes the furious flames underneath with stunts like slurring very publicly the bulk of Mexican immigrants this way: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

In his coy condemnation of a whole race of people, Donald Trump pretends he’s certain most Mexicans who move across our border bring illicit drugs and crime including rape but then makes as if he’s venturing some educated guess that just a few of these immigrants might be seen as good people. These are venomous hyperbole, legionnaire sophistry, tricks, intricate artifice and gimmickry. They’re sanguinary lies that just begin to scratch the surface of our president’s duplicitous speech and  behavior.      

So where’s American pride these days, our strong collective consciousness, our facile understanding of the things this country stands for, its values, standards, excellence, ideals, all the stuff of inspiration, of advancement and aplomb?

Am I dreaming right now? Has perception left me dry? Could it be that we have always been a cold, bigoted, avaricious, self-serving culture underneath, that we’ve never proven warm, close or caring, never gallant or refined, never genial, never virtuous, principled or kind. It’s hard to say. I don’t know. I only know I find it very hard to shake the nauseating sense that having put Trump in office some half of US voters might well have made a deal with the devil and I hope that if they’ve done so indeed, that grace is in the mixture and there won’t be hell to pay.

I can’t quell the agonizing vibe attesting fifty percent of the US voting public have relinquished all commitment to the sacred, founding, time-honored principles of democracy, human rights, freedom and justice, those impermeable makings for a paste that’s bound Americans together more than two rare, pioneering centuries and this in trade for hollow guarantee of some less elitist government from a disingenuous billionaire, himself an elite.    

No, I can’t help feeling some obscure cross-section of the country has surrendered our great American heritage to the echoes of cacophony arising from an empty little shell strewn idle on the beach. Such compromise happens at a staggering cost.

It’s disconcerting too that in the shadow of the bellicose Donald Trump campaign, a travesty that played to the very worst in human instinct, those many votes for Trump belied votes for xenophobia and misogyny just as much as for bigotry, racism and cruelty. Those votes for Trump were votes upholding lies, bullying, enmity, incivility, deep division and fierce violence which today imbue chaos, various hate crimes, sexual assault on women and random fits of grave instability, devastating wrong seldom seen in times of true and viable leadership .

Minority groups nationwide woke with dread today to harsh rekindlings of ire and resentment, to jitters of unrest, of confusion and uncertainty. Their dawn brought injustice, condescension, hostility, trepidation and a vast, new loathing for unnecessary scrutiny. For them the break of morning brought attacks both verbal and physical in the land of human rights, in the land where every human being is guaranteed asylum and safety, where all are pledged acceptance, opportunity and peace of mind, all promised life, freedom, happiness, equality, a land in which minorities were well upon the road to gaining miniscule fragments of this yet elusive covenant when trouble-making Donald Trump so rudely interrupted.

Does Trump glean this little slice of irony? Is Trump himself the little slice of irony at hand? Isn’t Donald Trump himself the very un-American cause of all this sad ironic strife, all this cheap, nasty, hate-filled, undue fray not heretofore given rise by any late president?

What a sad pass is this. What a fall from grace to play upon the world stage, untoward tribute to our imminent decline, stern witness to the rupture of a great civilization, grim accounting which only that high-minded voter might witness, acknowledge and abhor.

What’s done is done. We have a new president. We ought to try and bond behind our newly named leader and with fairness as a free, just and pluralistic culture, back The Donald when he’s right, duly buck him when he’s wrong and where necessary hold the man accountable in fond hopes that some small vestige of true American values may survive the next four to eight years. In the meantime, buckle up, hold tight and get yourselves pumped for a long and bumpy ride.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

♣ Spoiled sports? Sore losers? Crybabies? These are the kinds of cheap shots Trump supporters are taking lately at American voters who rue the election of Donald J. Trump, hordes of voters filling city streets nationwide and giving voice to their grave concern, dissent and solidarity.

Regular flack ranges in order of magnitude from shallow and inaccurate to false and misleading while every blast is lame, imprecise and misdirected of course. It’s the aim of Trump supporters, after all, to peg as mostly hypersensitive, unruly, ungracious and infantile the victims of Donald Trump and their dissent against his outright abuse, victims pegged by Trump before the world as indefensibly different, suspect, ominous, vile, inferior, undesirable, in effect somewhat less than human.

Trump’s abuse, harsh, constant, un-American, sets the kind of sad and dangerous precedent which begs public rebuke and renunciation from a free and diverse society. Whenever rebuke and renunciation do emerge, much in the name of honor, ethics, freedom and social justice, however, large groups of Trump-supporting name-callers emerge as well to belittle it.

There are many reasons name-callers cast their cheap aspersions on recipients of Donald Trump’s abuse. Of course they’re desperate to obscure beneath a vast barrage of false accusations those who call maltreatment what it is. Of the much shallower Trump-supporting name-callers, many view anti-Trump sentiment as tonic for the crestfallen, pap for those defeated when in fact it’s utter lifeblood for untold numbers of Americans who’ve sustained a heavy blow from this president.

Primarily, though, Trumpite name-callers hope to make small an issue undeniably huge. They hope to make miniscule the elephant in the parlor, to dismiss as insignificant and petty the preponderance of Donald Trump victims and their outraged advocates amassed on US streets yelling foul.

They stage their cheap derisions little guessing those who seek to label others only act out the hallmark of dysfunction and eventually they do what all dysfunctionals do. They blame the victim, in this case projecting on Donald Trump’s victims and their backers all blame for that abuse which in fact Trump himself has heaped on them.

By this devise name-callers can mitigate blame in the real culprit, collectively Donald Trump and the name-callers themselves, unaware of how transparent and rife with dysfunction their flimsy theatrics look to the more astute.

What gall not to take their abuse and like it, these too-dismissive name-callers seem to fault victims–like dissing minority groups as Trump has done is democratic while democratic activism against it is not.

Trump voters swear their candidate won democratically. They inform us that in this way democracy has been served and therefore Clintonite dissenters ought to shut up and deal with it.

Dissenting Clinton voters make a finer distinction however. Since an unjust man won by democratic vote, they say, democracy has been served and yet justice has not. They make a good point. At that, they make the whole point.

Anti-Trump sentiment in the American streets has nothing to do with winning and losing per say but rather with what manner of man has won and what that manner of man’s having won will mean for countless Americans targeted by Trump throughout the unrivaled travesty which marked his presidential campaign, what it will mean for all Americans as a treacherous blow to democracy, freedom and social justice.

It’s about social justice and Trump is front and center in the brouhaha, Trump who was really elected democratically in the technical sense but only after he stomped on social justice with the alacrity of a small boy breezing through a penny candy store with a shiny silver dollar clasped hotly in his hand.

Now he says the only thing that matters is that he won. How can Trump be so out of touch with the people, so oblivious to the irony of a win at their expense, so bereft of personal principles as to proudly place winning above fair play and social responsibility?

Is Donald Trump a man without discernment or a man without honor? To be sure he’s a man of rather questionable integrity with a long-languishing sense of human respect, no small considerations for the up and coming leader of perhaps the world’s freest, most pluralistic society.

This dirth of human respect shows a gross lack of principles. Where principles prove few and inconsistant the core values and priorities of a government and the society under its jurisdiction soon grow dangerously skewed. A cavalier stance grips the nation over time. In awhile patterns of living become erratic and soon Intolerance, incivility and violence rise and flourish.

In the absence of principles there can be no truth, no order,  neither anchor nor sound frame of reference for the norms, mores, values and priorities of a people, no dependable criteria for human interaction nor reliable paradigm for human behavior.

The powerful seize control and do whatever serves themselves while the weak regress into self-absorption and mayhem. Time will tell us more on how this cavalier posture plays out in Trump’s imminent first term as chief executive.

It beggars belief that after such brash and stunningly un-American antics by a would-be statesman, such inconceivably raw, rabid, racial, ethnic, religious and sexual slurs as Donald Trump slung in his scourge of a presidential bid, there still exist Trump supporters who take his hapless victims and their natural, dutiful, infinitely democratic protestations lightly, who trivialize their sense of denigration and betrayal then mock their plight in general with Trumped-up charges of “spoiled sport,” “sore loser” and “crybaby,” charges little children might bring against other little children who are losing ungraciously at hopscotch.

How, after the brutal, more than year long, bigotry-charged and very public tongue lashing Americans underwent from Trump, could hecklers even dream any pigeonholed person, any demonized minority is anything but legitimately concerned for their welfare these days?

Are they blind or do they grasp indeed the flagrant stigmatization of a few with all of its deep, profoundly darksome implications, grasp its toll and opt anyway to lie, spin, distort, propagandize and diminish their fellow Americans for a vague political notion, some prescribed, heady, nationalistic whim, some distorted, self-aggrandizing myth about their own unerring superiority?

Do they understand it’s not social diversity alone but American honor, freedom, human rights and social justice, core American values and principles, the integrity of the Constitution itself that are currently under siege by Donald Trump and the extreme right elements he panders to?

Trump likely slandered those he did just to foment stronger passion and support for his political platform. He was that resolved to win at any cost.

It’s disturbing, however, to think that after all was said and done, Trump may never have taken the process, taken its negative implications or its many wretched victims very seriously, to think that in the final analysis all were mere conveniences for the candidate whose campaign was just a giant manipulation anyway.

Monumental damage has been done these many victims and America at large in the process. Some of it might be years undoing,  some beyond repair.

Whether bigoted in itself or collaborative with bigotry, this dark dynamic stands as part of a tacit subjugation process spawned by Donald Trump and now furthered by an effete corps of denigrating Trumpite name-callers.

Victims of this tacit subjugation woke November 8th to find themselves frazzled and confused, dismayed about their places in this erstwhile Promised Land so many helped to build.

They’re tentative now, indignant, apprehensive about their freedom, safety, security and prospective treatment, as many not directly stung by the process are prone to be apprehensive about the freedom, safety, security and prospective treatment of loved ones, friends, neighbors and simple fellow Americans.

They’re concerned about the future. They’re fretful about the uncharted path our country’s chosen in making Trump its forty fifth president.

Those hit squarely by the Trump dehumanization tack, its stark implications and many gritty realities in the form of violent hate crimes and racist acts, some in fact credited right to Donald Trump himself, comprise anything but disgruntled fans left supping on sour grapes.

These are the disinherited, forced to feed on poison berries, many faced with possible life-threatening situations. All feel the long-sought, hard-gotten quality of their lives reduced dramatically with the advent of Trump given the swath this man has recarved for social injustice, incivility and racial strife, a swath shaven clean beneath the double-edged scythe of bigoted rhetoric and supplication to bigots everywhere.

Hillary Clinton voters, sore losers? Well, losers, yes. Democratic minorities lost big. They lost more than just an election this time. Sore? Yeah, like anyone finally making strides and beaten down for the umpteenth time feels pretty damned sore right now, like anyone seeing the faint glimmer of unity or feeling the vague bristle of pride and suddenly faced with railing and rampant Trumpism, confronted with fresh divisiveness and dehumanization feels pretty sore right now.

Spoiled sports? Okay, sports maybe. The spoiled are accustomed to winning however. Few constant winners here I’m afraid.

Crybabies? How so? Infants don’t struggle, don’t overcome. Fledglings don’t weep for lost ground. Only the cognizant, the caring, the compassionate, the consummately mature shed a tear for lost freedom, flagging justice and inhumanity which torment the soul, shame the race, shame through empathy both victor and victim indiscriminately.

The stigmatization of those in dread of Donald Trump as none but querulous spoiled sports, sore losers and crybabies, piqued fans grieving over the loss of a sporting event is short-sighted to the point of absurdity. It’s cruel to the point of atrocity.

It trivializes vital issues and those effected by them. It doesn’t nearly characterize the many feeling justifiably threatened by a newly elected leader who has daily both directed and drawn fierce hostility toward them, fierce hostility toward their groups and toward their counterparts nationwide.

Instead of pondering just how bias came to roost with such impunity, acquiescence and instigation from top leaders here in this, of all places, the good ole USA, many Trump voters have closed their minds and reduced themselves to name-calling, minimizing a critical situation, some blind to the finer details of that situation, others hip to them all but too insensitive or biased themselves to address them.

On the one hand, demeaning epithets bantied about in this puerile bit of name-calling gravitate toward  sanctimonious dreck.

They’re drivel spewed about anti-Trump activists by a narrow, petty, vapid, heartless, largely dismissive clique of Trumpite drones loath to learn or understand what’s really at stake in the recent election for minority groups and others embroiled in passionate protest across the United States.

On the other hand, the designations made include tags affixed to activists by sharply astute, equally narrow, unfeeling but especially coy, politically driven spin-doctors, cold, practiced liars obscuring the truth by distorting the truth and finally assaulting the most basic if intricate truth running so much deeper than wounded pride or scorched ego chasing plain competitive loss, truth that lies at the heart of minority cultures, supports their safety and serenity, downright proves their rightful places in society, truth that forms the core of sacred American principles, values, rule of law, truth that embodies the very soul of our democracy.

While truth presents the one and only, steadfast, universal currency for human interaction, this diehard band of philosophical twerps continue to souse themselves in informational counterfeiting, communicational sobotage that conflates truth and impedes the advancement of all mankind. Still, incredibly, they find it a source of personal aggrandizement and pride.

In one of US history’s rarest instances, a presidential candidate acted publicly in a manner unbefitting a US president. He presumed to court brazenly and unencumbered the primal forces of racism, white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Then, winning as much because of it as in spite of the dalliance, Donald Trump acceded to the nation’s highest office.

Trump’s ostensible lies, vicious attacks on American citizens, shameless appeal to alt-rightists, bigots, misogynists and xenophobes were firmly endorsed by more than half the voting population. What were Trump voters thinking anyway? How could they not have gleaned that such a man was bad for America?

Donald Trump’s endorsement then doubled back to embolden, even mobilize the same hate factions against their traditional target groups with heightened enthusiasm, new justification and a sense of tacit, unbound executive permission, this crushing minority citizenship’s long-sought, hard-forged shield against aggression and rendering these target groups, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, women, gays and many others much weakened, more vulnerable than before, reducing them once again to the level of social pariahs, essentially bulldozing them physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually into degrading US policy-imposed exile in the confines of their own reputedly indivisible country, exile degrading as much for the country as the victims themselves.

Does this warped dynamic not run contradictory to human rights provisions? Does it not dishonor America, all Americans and the American presidency? Do we not value honor in America any more?

With election of someone who calculatingly romanced the bigoted underbelly of this nevertheless great country, a man who held minority groups up incessantly to rancor and public ridicule, millions across America feel aghast, disenfranchised, vulnerable, at serious risk, filled with understandable dread, doubt, disbelief, fear for their well-being, some for their very lives, those of loved ones, friends and fellow Americans.

Indeed, since Donald Trump’s election once inhibited racist acts and hate crimes have risen markedly, some in the name of Trump himself whom haters say inspired them.

So it is that many thousands in cities nationwide have spontaneously, without guide of leadership or organization, commandeered the city streets charged with fear, anxiety, incredulity and desperate hope as if adrift in some dystopian nightmare, fallen prey to some apocalyptic vision come to pass which, to pique their dread, some fifty percent of voters either cannot or will not concede much less comprehend, though certain of them see clearly, understand and celebrate anyway.

Spoiled sports? Sore losers? Crybabies? Americans under siege by their own is more like it.

 

 

 

 

 

                         

 

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

♣ The Nominee is the party and the party the nominee. It can be no other way in a democracy. Donald Trump showed his colors early on but staunch republicans failed to oust their candidate when they had the chance. It’s clear they wanted a winner first and foremost. Republicans wanted a winner so intensely in fact that they backed a man who in retrospect many consider a boar and a bigot, a loose canon, a renegade, a disruptive intruder at odds with their party’s designated values. A distance into the circus tour that comprised the Trump campaign, signs that Donald Trump was a man of poor character seemed of little concern to the GOP desperate for control. From Jump Street the authoritarian ring master flaunted brash contempt on the sleeve of his coat like a neon swasticka armband with scarce a murmur of righteous indignation from Republicans.

Trump mocks a handicapped journalist.

Now it’s official. Donald Trump is the GOP nominee. Too late. The people have spoken. Indeed the Republican party has spoken. Suddenly staunch Republicans want to distance themselves from Trump, a difficult task as now they drink from the same tainted well as he. Even now,  genie hovering sprightly over his bottle, it’s not so much Donald Trump’s poor character that’s in question as his misalignment with standard Republican values. Wow, what a sad and sobering testament to those values. Despite his brazen slander, racist rhetoric and maledictory speech, his blatant lies, childish antics, organizational nonconformity and of course the waking cries from all his outraged detractors, Trump continues to run a pretty close race. Whatever the end, republicans can’t win for the losing. For the GOP, win is lose and lose win. Whatever the end, the end is nigh for the GOP, this owing as much to lost integrity in the ranks as to the anarchistic turns of their perfidious rogue agent Donald Trump. The nominee is the party and the party the nominee. It can be no other way in a democracy.

Yes, Republicans drink from the same tainted well today. To the unprincipled, truth, right and precedent are elusive ideas which inspire little conviction. For those who lack conviction all of life is serious quandary. Those Republicans in a quandary over Trump are simply lost as to whether to serve the party or serve their errant candidate. They’re lost as to whether to serve victory or serve the public good? Of course, the standard way to freshen a well is to disinfect the water. As long as contaminate Trump continues to dip his ladel into the party well, cleansing the dirty font remains moot however. A pure well from which all Republicans might drink these days cannot endure for one integral reason, due to one salient fact, according to one ineluctable truth. The nominee is the party and the party the nominee. It can be no other way in a democracy.

Those chosen to moderate the Republican primary debates allotted Donald Trump too much space to misbehave, space that soon unleashed a bully and his tactics, crucial stomping ground that clinched the nomination for Trump in the end. In addition, many staunch Republicans waited too long to grow a conscience. Many another party hack never did. More, many staunch Republicans waited too long for Trump to get in line. Sadly, Trump never did. Tough luck. Snooze, ya loose, morally and materially. Staunch Republicans knew from the start exactly who Trump was. As soon as they chose to hold out, they sold out. Now it’s a lock, a done deal: No deposit, no return. The nominee is the party and the party the nominee. It can be no other way in a democracy.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

Donald Trump is famous for his spontaneous speechifying, spewing populist rhetoric in boundless stream of consciousness. He’s well known for his loose pontifications, his meandering demagoguery fraught with lies, slander and insolence, just redolent with derision, malediction and accusation, rife with hubris, spite, ascendancy and racism, downright festering with anger, intolerance and turmoil. For a year now the world’s borne witness to it.

Suddenly, though, at a Trump rally in North Carolina on 8/18, hours after a dramatic change in Trump campaign leadership, the candidate gave a more disciplined, more cohesive and more presidential speech than he ever has before.

Can this speech, a drastic, wholly apparent, opportune departure from the rabble-rousing tirades of his sordid past reflect a sudden transformation in Trump’s personal makeup? Has Donald Trump changed? Can a superficial reference to solemn contrition by an erstwhile vicious and impenitent bully as atonement for a solid year of unbridled impudence, months and months of untoward antics and unspeakable slurs signal newfound grace, prove earnest if belated circumspection and remorse? I can’t see how.

Trump’s borne no late shocks to the system seismic enough to make the leopard change his spots. The frightful boar behind the more refined public speaking thrives unchanged, unrepentant, uninspired, untouched. Donald Trump has gone underground for the moment, merely opted for the optics, nothing more. He’s chosen to conceal the ugly spots for A time. He’s decided to appear better groomed, let his questionable image (keyword image) be slum artificially into something better fit for broad consumption under the auspices of a new and ruthless force at the helm.

A quick image overhaul is hardly character evolution. One turn to diplomatic means is not a change of heart. A lone professional speech all of a sudden does scratch to erase a whole year of ignoble sentiment. A single tailored speech out of the blue to the druthers of true conservative voters can’t conceal the speaker’s proven identity. No amount of damage control can mend the tarnished image of a visible, now well-studied Donald Trump.

Steve Bannon can’t mask sufficiently the devious, haughty, overweening cad whom Trump remains and who, even if he doesn’t host personally the  unchecked contagions of ethnic, religious and sexual bias, does to a large extent court, indulge, dispense and fan the flames of all these grievous wrongs.

Trump fuels that prejudicial anger and intolerance which is tantamount to hatred and violence. He does so quite consistently and effectively, not so much through open hate mongery as through more subtle weaponry like racist rhetoric, divisive solicitation, clear, emboldening innuendo and that omnipresent, inspirational, swaggering ascendancy of the outright, dyed-in-the wool supremist.

Donald Trump remains the very miscreant he was before his latest speech, the same vicious, vacuous, vituperative vipor, the same panderer to bigots and misogynists, elitists and xenophobes, the identical purveyor of doom, fear and slander that Donald Trump has always been. Guaranteed.

Unfortunately, narcissism, arrogance, ignorance, autocracy, recklessness, profanity and bigotry, vile traits, all traits intrinsic to this one specific rich, spoiled, dyed-in-the-wool, uniquely insular septuagenarian, won’t likely vanish overnight. Of course Trump has been admonished for them all and there’s a sage old adage that applies to this awkward circumstance, to wit: If three people say you’re sick, lie down. Trump never does lie down however. Instead he seems impervious to criticism of any kind or quantity.

Then again, the presidential hopeful neither sees nor acknowledges his own fatal flaws, lauding even negative commentary positive publicity. He’s out of touch and obstinate too. Indeed, the numb-nutted needler seems to sense little outside pressure to lie down, whatever staggering number of provident and well-meaning observers bid him kindly do so. Perhaps this unwavering obstinacy derives from Trump’s stubborn self image or a die-hard element of his obvious narcissism.

In any case, there’s wisdom in the adage and I sense that while he’s loath to lie down of his own volition, reckless Donald Trump will likely fall down instead and very soon, good lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise. In the end it’s simple anyway, despite how tickled pink pundits are to harp on mere public image and the consequential need for phony speeches to promote it. It’s not just the speech but the man behind the speech who must prove presidential. Good luck with that one, Donny.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

♣ Melania Trump was stalwart, poised and eloquent in the deliverance of her speech honoring husband, now presidential nominee Donald Trump, at the Republican National Convention on July 18th. That was opening day of the RNC. Since then, however, it’s grown apparent that parts of Melania’s speech were taken pretty much verbatim from a speech Michelle Obama gave to honor her own husband Barack Obama eight years ago at the DNC. Before her speech Melania Trump told Matt Lauer of NBC “I wrote it.  And with as little help as possible.”

Whether it’s true Melania cribbed parts of the First Lady’s speech herself or accepted the help of a falsehearted accessory before the fact, some friend or professional speechwriter perhaps, doesn’t matter much. Effectively the result was just the same. The wife of Donald Trump presented someone else’s words as her own at a major political do for all the world to see. Melania Trump is no professional speechwriter of course. In all fairness then, the amateur must be granted a little grace despite what amounts to a wrongful indiscretion nonetheless, a possible amateur miscalculation or maybe a poor beginner’s oversight, one made on Melania’s part or the part of a likewise inept aid. Remember, however, she did declare “I wrote it.  And with as little help as possible.”

Whatever the case, in making the speech Melania was playing a key role at a key event that was selling not only herself but a man who was nothing short of the newly chosen Republican Party nominee for president of the United States. More, she was playing the role before hundreds of millions. She was no callow middle school teen tinnily whining out her spruced-up book report for a twelfth grade Lit class. Jeese, where were Donald Trump’s manager and staff in regard to a major speech at a major event with the presidency at stake? Where was Donald Trump himself, spoiler, ringmaster, the man who would be king? What subterranean form of gross neglect could have preceded such an unthinkably inauspicious blunder?

At the least, Mrs. Trump’s clear appropriation of passages from the famed speech of another only begs more questions and caution about the Donald Trump campaign, its meager staff and Trump himself, a man whose personal qualifications and character stand in very serious question already. Was usage of Michelle’s words in Melania’s speech an act of attribution born of simple admiration, Melania’s personal admiration or maybe that of a certain aid or aids assisting, admiration for the First Lady’s own special prowess as a speechmaker or, perish the thought, was it out-and-out plagiarism?

Why was Melania’s speech never vetted? Wasn’t miming parts of Michelle Obama’s speech, whether in neophytic innocence or deference to a mentor, sure to render all sentiment in Melania’s own speech inauthentic, make Melania Trump herself appear shamefully disingenuous? Melania’s speech was already conspicuously devoid of personal references, details and anecdotes after all .

At the same time, It’s hard to imagine a seasoned professional tied to something as public as a political convention being daft enough to purposely pirate a well-known document. In that light it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that gross ineptitude lay at the heart of the matter.  When grouped with many another faux pas by the Trump campaign, a voter can only ask if such casual incompetence is indicative of the wholesale whimsy, alacrity and devil-may-care ease with which an elected Trump is bound to run the country, destined to lead the free world.

Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort flatly denied that Melania’s often word-for-word copy of Michelle Obama’s speech was intentional. More, he termed accusations of Trump campaign plagiarism “crazy” Tuesday morning on CNN, then in a flagrant bid to shift negative attention to his rival, blamed the accusations on what he framed a skittish Hillary Clinton. This is downright Orwellian.

With a ruse like this, Paul Manafort flies in the face of salient truth. He claims for all the world that things are not what they most clearly are. Who would guess the intellectually lax and incurious Donald Trump, with help from a manager thick enough to rate voters blind and stupid, would ever be first to usher in the Orwellian Age? Eliza Collins pointed out in USA Today that there was no sign Clinton was connected to the speech or its loud repercussions for that matter. Woah! Big surprise!

Paul Manafort even dared  claim similarities between Melania Trump’s speech and that of Michelle Obama were strictly coincidental, that Melania or her speechwriters selected common words to describe common values and thus some unavoidable similarities. Sorry Paul but all of those same words arranged in far too often the same sequence sentence after sentence can be no mere coincidence, even to us down here in the busy, half-lit halls of the rank and file. You can shelf your “Stupid Meter.” It’s poorly aimed and warrants calibration.

In more denial, Jason Miller, Trump’s communications advisor, threw up a thin, malodorous smoke screen. In a statement, Miller proposed that since Melania’s team of writers did draw from their notes on her “life’s inspirations” and sometimes even infused bits of “her own thinking,” the speech did originate entirely with her.

Miller then dared hint, waxing most sentimentally, that because, as he put it, “Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success” her fellow Americans would be cold and callous indeed to acknowledge the least impropriety from this fine, exemplary figure, though that impropriety glared out belittlingly at them all. In other words, working from a jingoistic fervor, Miller boldly spun the patriotic elements of Melania Trump’s speech in hopes of overshadowing any wrongdoing.

It seemed Tuesday morning that despite its crucial bearing on the event, we might never know precisely what Melania Trump meant when she apprised Matt Lauer: “I wrote it.  And with as little help as possible.” Wednesday, however, a staff-writer for Donald Trump who ghostwrote many Trump books as well quite contritely took blame for the indiscretion saying she worked with Melania Trump on her First Lady speech and wrote lines from Michelle Obama’s speech read her over the phone by Mrs. Trump as choice examples.

One Merideth McIver said she used some of the phrasing in what became Melania Trump’s final speech, then neglected to check that phrasing against Mrs. Obama’s speech, this presumably for conceptual and wording similarities. McIver claims she gave her resignation to Trump but the candidate wouldn’t have it.

Just before release of Ms. McIver’s statement, Donald Trump tweeted the message “all press is good press!” Was the event known later as the Melania speech scandal only a ploy arranged by Trump and friends for use as negative press, in other words, good press. If so, then exactly how much of Trump’s bad behavior during the past year’s campaigning was gauged to serve the same purpose?

Some two days passed before the Trump campaign conceded certain passages in Melania Trump’s speech mimed lines in Michelle Obama’s of 2008. Downright oozing insincerity, Trump manager Paul Manafort was still denying obvious similarities in a CNN interview Wednesday morning. Crooked Hillary indeed!

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com