The American Dream, twenty-first century version, is sliding inexorably - though still happily imperceptible to some - into a dystopian nightmare. The ascendance of Donald Trump brings to mind the elevation of Victor Hugo's slow-witted hunchback Quasimodo to Pope during the Feast of Fools, for last November we elected our own "Lord of Misrule." The difference being that the unwashed masses of Paris knew it was all in fun. But now, alas, the joke is on us.
Yes, people have had it up to here with Washington. But this election was about other things too. Ominous things. What the pundits politely call "Obama Derangement Syndrome". Eight years of a black president had left many white Americans disoriented, some of them bursting with hate. They wanted to "Make America Great Again". To go back to when being white gave you a leg up, regardless of merit. The irony is that white privilege never left, it just became a little more subtle.
Well, now they have their Fool, and it ain't subtle anymore. White Supremacists are out of the closet, and protecting white Americans against "discrimination" is a major mission of the Justice Department, led by that intrepid Southern gentleman Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. And he assures us that there's no longer any need to monitor big-city police departments on their treatment of minority citizens.
They voted for change. They wanted a president who speaks their language. His benighted "base" loves the way he talks. But that's all they have in common with him. He could not care less about their lives, he's emotionally incapable of empathy for them or their problems. His overriding concerns are for his wealth, his family, his TV ratings, and making personal attacks on critics great and small. (See Trump's denigration of John McCain, a war hero now fighting for his life.) National policy, foreign and domestic, is outside the scope of his intelligence and his patience. The only wild card in our march to coarseness and ineptitude is what the Russian connection turns out to be. Because the Republicans will do nothing to protect against Trump, for fear of being "primaried."
The sad irony for his followers is that Washington is worse now than ever before, because this president has created a climate of "anything goes" and those in power have a license to wheel and deal, never mind the good of the country, it's everyone for himself. On the same day a massacre takes place in Las Vegas, the stock market makes a big gain. Hey, you win some, you lose some. So as long as you deny climate change (there have always been floods, see Noah), obey the NRA and big donors, and make sure you're seen going to church on Sunday, you've got it made.
The backlash against the Obama years has - in less than ten months - turned us into a country of snarling, tribal primitives, at the same time laughed at for the sheer stupidity of our leadership - tweet, tweet - and feared because of the uncertainty we inject into the global landscape.
So let the chaos commence. They have gotten what they wished for, we are all fools, afflicted for the foreseeable future by "The Great White Dope" lurking in the White House.
