By Jeff Guy
It’s 5:19 a.m., Martin Luther King Day in small town Kansas across the street from the liquor store, Kwiki Mart, Reebles Grocery Store and the Nazarene Church. Summer was an easier time. COVID. “Fuck your feelings, I’m not wearing a mask.” The Trump years.
In fewer hours than there are years to my life (I think) Joe Biden will become President. And it’s like 2020 24 hours to go -- around the world.
“It seems like five years since the election,” my daughter, Kenzie said in the night as I careered my Nissan down U.S. 81, returning from Derby where I’d bought groceries at Aldi’s.
She’s right. The articles in The Atlantic and New Yorker in December, talking about the coming coup and threat to Democracy, are quaint now. Never thought I’d see the day when “grab ‘em by the pussy” would seem lightweight.
Friday morning, I dropped my girl off at the sidewalk leading almost like a Candyland game board to the sweet doors of Worthington High School.
“Why are the flags at Half-Mast?” she asked.
“It’s for the police officer who got killed at the insurrection,” I said.
A few blocks away from my work place, sitting at a red light light at the intersection of Seneca and Maple in Wichita, I read the sticker on the F-150 in front of me. “Cruz for President.” That’s not going to age well.
That day, in the office, I scrolled Facebook.
“Look at this shit,” I said to my friend, Vickie, in the next cubicle.
“I know,” she said. She was on Facebook too. We’re all on Facebook.
Rioters climbing walls. I knew there would be protests, but I figured there would be safety measures. That it turned out not to be didn’t surprise me, though.
I always knew the unholy alliance between Mainstream American Christianity and Right Wing politics was racist in its conception, but I couldn’t prove it.
Nowadays, it’s no secret. We all know. A liberal leaning pastor friend of mine recommended the Amazon Prime documentary, White Savior: Racism in the American Church to me. I probably won’t see it, though, because I don’t want to give that billionaire asswipe, Jeff Bezos, any money.
I knew, even though I couldn’t prove it, that there was racism in the NRA, which is sad because the late Charlton Heston marched for Civil Rights in the ‘60s.
The secret is out. The NRA only supports gun permits for white people. If cops are disrespectful to a white packing person, the NRA is vociferous. A Black man with a permit to carry a firearm in his glove box gets shot by a cop and it’s silent night, holy night.
This bothers me most.
I knew all the time that Trump’s talk about “law and order” was a lie. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” For one group, it was -- bring out the SWAT team. For another, it was “you’re special.” “We love you.”
A few Capitol Police officers posed for selfies with rioters. A few cops from around the country attacked their own. A Capitol Police Officer was crushed in a doorway, screaming in the siege. Officer Brian Sicknick, bashed in the head with a fire extinguisher, died in the hospital.
Congress people, like soldiers in a foxhole, hidden, crying, praying, thinking they could die.
Trump has no respect for the law. After all, he could go out on the street and shoot somebody and people would love him. But Rudy Guiliani was a federal prosecutor. He put bad guys away. Or was he perpetuating the White Supremacist “just-us” system? How do you go from being a top law enforcement officer to inciting a riot?
“Let’s have trial by combat.”
Crowd chanting.
“Hang Mike Pence!”
Gallows and a noose hanging in the Washington D.C. air. They ate their own, as will the many who will throw their friends under the bus to escape prison.
A gazillion social media images to build a case with. A retired cop friend of mine, said, “Jeff, I was in law enforcement for 30 years and I never saw a smart criminal.”
The man in the nation’s capital who dressed like Lord of the Flies. The man who ransacked Pelosi’s office and took a dump in there. The West Virginia legislator who stormed the building. The right-wing activist who sent 80 buses. Not smart criminals.
Much like a knotty-pated young man I knew in high school. Piss drunk on rotgut one off-center night, he took a shit through the open sun-roof of a teacher’s car. The absence of toilet paper barely registered a shoulder shrug from him, I’m told. Stupid criminal.
This was in the ‘80s when a thin Trump was still on TV talk shows and in tabloids for dating models and cheating on whatever woman he was married to then. I never dreamed that a wealthy, self-entitled person could one day become a populist hero. That he’d milk white rage.
I’d read in my high school history textbook about the storm brewing in Europe during the ‘30s, kids in Depression America movie houses viewing black and white newsreel footage of Hitler and Mussolini, with their exaggerated gesticulations as comic opera. Boys on school yards, who a decade later, would be fighting in Europe and the Pacific, clownishly mimicked fascist goose stepping they’d seen on screen before the Clark Gable movie.
I was perplexed as to why the German people were okay with ovens, gas showers and houses of horrors. Everyone wonders that. But how could they be hornswoggled by this fool? He’s obviously a loser. Right? They called him charismatic?
Trump doesn’t speak like a politician. He talks like one of us...fake news...shithole countries...knock the crap out of ‘em. Toxic masculinity. An ass-talking walrus.
Ultimately, I hope Trump finally does identify with the working class by sitting on a bunk next to a steel toilet behind a locked cage while wearing a government issued jumpsuit, flame covered, dwarfing his tanning bed hue and urine-colored hair. I hope he pays the rest of his pathetic life for putting America through hell.
Why don’t we just unite as Americans? Reject impeachment, say Republican lawmakers who were crying and praying in the bunker. Not this time.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who looks like Grandpa, from The Munsters, should never be heard from again. Sen. Josh Hawley was once Missouri’s attorney general. Just-us I don’t think he’s done anything bad enough to go to prison for, which he oughta be thanking God about. He looks like a pussy. Don’t think he’d survive in prison around the men he put away.
Kansas Trump groupies, Rep. Ron Estes, Sen. Roger Marshall, Mike “Pompass” Pompeo and the rest of the wrecking crew should have no futures, just rooms at cheap, crummy, hotels from which they call one shoestring non-profit after another, looking for a little socialist relief.
Reconciliation doesn’t address the problem.
How did we get here? As a young reporter in the 90s, I saw trouble brewing. Dominionist freaks ranting about the “Homosexual agenda,” trying to ban books from the public library and calling for Supreme Court justices to be strung up. Further back? Reagan joking about “welfare queens” in Philadelphia, Mississippi? Goldwater? Joe McCarthy?. Strom Thurmond’s opposition to anti-lynching legislation.
No, this pre-dates the Civil War. The first slaves were shipped here from Africa in 1619 and the long shadow of Original Sin casts itself in our collective memory. In 1607, the Jamestown settlers, who’d been digging up corpses of dead family members and eating the decomposing flesh because they were starving, were saved from annihilation by the Natives. So they started killing indigenous Natives.
African American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates told Daily Show host Trevor Noah he expects the problem to outlive him. Obviously, racism is not going to be eradicated in my lifetime. I’d like to think my kids, or their kids, will see the end of it.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the Biden inauguration, but there’s no panacea. All relationships require a lot of work. Put a little love in your heart, but shut the sun-roof.
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