For a while, at least once daily for the last 4 years, I have fantasized that my remaining Republican friend, Brett, was going to call or, better yet, invite me for beer and brats and say, “Gotcha”, when we get together.
Playing along, since I already knew where he was going with this, I would respond, “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that I finally decided it was time to quit fooling around and just level with you. Your bugging the shit out of me has finally paid off. I finally caved. As a matter of fact, it happened several weeks ago when I realized that my team was probably gonna lose, maybe big, and I don’t like being a loser. Besides, I think I realized you might be right. In part. But I wanted to see you suffer a little. In a fun way, of course. No water-boarding.” Then he laughs his ass off at his own joke.
“You mean you’re voting Republican?”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down, big guy. Who said anything about the Republican ticket?” I’m talking the big kahuna, not the whole enchilada.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“Nope, I’m not. I decided that he was not presidential material as it turns out. I thought he really did look good on paper before 2016, but, ya know, he has blown it a coupla times as a president. He shouldn’t have used the P word publicly, at least not on tape, or delayed releasing the early information on Covid. Who knows, he may have saved a few lives. Also, he acts like a racist but I don’t think he is one. He’s just bad for the party.”
“What about Mitch ‘Gobble, Gobble,’ McConnell? He’s a Trump buttlicker and he leads the Senate around by the nose.”
“You know I was raised a Kentucky fried chicken, so I may not vote out old Mitch, but it’s tempting. Either he isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed or he is the sharpest. Maybe both.” He laughs again at his own joke, and I’m wondering why I have liked this guy since college. “He stands out in a rainstorm with his head aiming to the sky,” I say. Hoping to get a laugh. “And what about Lindsay, “y’all come” Graham? He’s another Senate invertebrate.” No laugh again.
“I stuck with Trump at Charlottesville because he really didn’t say that there were good people on both sides. That was PBS fake news. But in the first debate, he did by not having the cajones to condemn the white supremacists, and that bothered me. I was going WTF? They are new Nazis and we all know the Nazis did not give out good vibes during the big one. Trust me, I believe the history books. When I was a teenager, we knew an old Jew on our block, who hadescaped the Holocaust but his family didn’t. He had some badass stories, which may not have all been true, but he showed me black & white photos of his wife and kids. Pretty sad old man.”
“The boss also made a comment in Debate 2 about having done more for blacks in America since Honest Abe. And that he was the least racist person in the room. WTF? The moderator, Kristin Whelper was black. And shockingly pretty, I might add. Trump probably didn’t know that because he probably was staring at her black rack.” He laughed again.
And what about Nobama? He must have done something for his own people. Nobody else, though.” He chuckled again. “And the crowning blow was the statement about immigrants at the wall having to turn around and go home and only those with the lowest IQs returned for their court cases. How would he know? At this point in our history, he might be right. The higher the IQ, the greater the likelihood they may opt to stay in Venezuela or Guatemala. Keen sabe?”
“Were you fooled? Did I getcha?” Brett asked.
“Yeah, you really did.”
I thought to myself, why are we even having this conversation? You got a degree from a good college even though it was in VCR repair, you come from a professional Midwest family. Why wouldn’t Trump scare the bejesus out of you at the getgo? You read the National Enquirer, so you know all about his escapades. You thought 9/11 was the end of the world? What’s the difference? Trump has been a nuclear war on slow boil.
And now, you finally get what I’ve been saying all along? Why now? Why not when the guy stole his first bag of marbles from a crippled kid and then beat him up? Is it that you hate to lose and now you recognize him as a loser?
To the best of my knowledge, we have never seen a loser of this magnitude in a high office before. On second thought, we did see Seabiscuit lose against a 3-legged Shetland pony, and even a second time against a clock.
Pride would explain the reason many continue to vote for Donald but most of his supporters don’t have much to be proud of so what are they defending?
But these would be the same individuals who would be proud of their pet rock or their grade school drop-out to take a career in prostitution. Were pride the issue, these people would be proud to be asked to join a golf foursome of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and Trump.
And then there’s the money motivator. Most people don’t divulge openly their goal in life is to make bundles of dough as easily as possible. Admirable goal if you don’t have much else in your life but materialism. But the materialists still don’t get the simplest of economics equations when they ignore the environment:
Zero Ecology = Zero Economy
Or in a way more sophisticated equation:
Climate Change = Fire = Zero Trees = Zero Houses = Zero Income
There is a reason the words ecology and economy sound similar; they have the same Greek root; oikos, and oikos means family, or family property or house, implying a system that is open in the sense that it requires an input of energy to run it. True of both an ecosystem, true of an economic system, but the ecological system – economic system is a one-way relationship. You can have a healthy ecosystem without a healthy economic system, but not the reverse. So, a devastated tropical rainforest ecosystem causes a destroyed economy that based its livelihood on a healthy rainforest.
Of course, I never said any of these things to Brett, I just wondered. Did the Nazi guards play Gotcha with the Jews? Trump never killed anyone, as far as we know but on the other hand how many thousands of people might not have died from Covid-19 were it not for the fact that he covered up Covid-19 and blamed the Chinese for its spread, has made a mockery of lockdown and scientists even after he got the crud himself, and never has come up with a comprehensive national plan.
I wish Brett would play Gotcha with me, but I really don’t care, if I could only be assured that there are thousands of Bretts faking it in America, who would admit to themselves that it was a mistake in 2016 and vote for a future not a today. No one has to know, that’s the beauty of the vote. No one has to know. The outcome matters only to us. The fact that the world is watching and waiting to see if we are as stupid as they think we are doesn’t. Dubya 2X raised some eyebrows but Trump 2X would ice the cake.
Trump was a massive mistake in 2016 but we did it anyway maybe because he was what we believed to be the panacea to a dysfunctional Washington. Drain the swamp. Only now that swamp has spread across America. Getting to know Trump over 4 years has been entertaining, disgusting, shocking and now frightening. We unleashed a bad genie and now we have to get him back in the box.
Domestically speaking, I think it’s safe to say that this level of polarization occurred only once in our history: The Civil War. You can’t count the Revolutionary War because we were in solidarity against the Red Coats. Social polarization is a bridge that stretches until the center collapses leaving no connective cables.
Four more years of fueled hatred and distrust of each other would be irrevocable and those four years would give a madman plenty of time to complete his work. I don’t think Trump is bright enough to have mapped out a plan, but he has had years of predatory business experience to see that this country was floundering and stressed. He saw that the henhouse was unguarded, and the hens drugged or primping themselves to distraction. I don’t think our democracy has been seriously challenged since The Civil War but now there is no Abraham Lincoln around. There has never been a worse time in history for such an internal attack because it is occurring simultaneously with the two external and the most horrific assailants in history: an unleashed pandemic and unleashed climate change. What happens when you add a Santa Ana to a powder dry raging wildfire? You might as well add gasoline. That forest will not come back in decades, probably never to its original state. Failure is not an option. This is not a wake-up call, this is a last call. The wake-up call was four years ago.
