"It was the best of times. it was the worst of times....."

"It was the best of times.

it was the worst of times....."

 

Charles Dickens.

 

 

 

Discerning what it is that comprises a Trump voter at this stage of the game befuddles me.

Supposedly, we are to let the other side voice their opinions, to let them explain their puzzling positions.

 

I for one, cannot understand the continued support for Trump from any quarter.

As an American, I am thrown into a tree chipper of conundrums: the racism, the white supremacy, the paranoia against blacks and other minorities, the trashing of our allies and support for our adversaries, the virulently hidden financial black holes, the insults, the divisiveness, the disrespect for the Constitution and the rule of law, the misogynism,  the loutishness, the lies, the false claims of conspiracies and birtherism, the destruction of the American image of morality and generosity are among those inexplicable rendering me powerless, incompetent, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.  Pax Americana?   It has been in the 75 years since the end of that colossal global tragedy, 50 million people killed.  Our alliances with our allies have kept the world together, maintained the peace.

 

When we and our allies won World War II, we did not seek to expand our colonial empire unlike the English who wished to do so; Churchill, an 19th century imperialist, wished to retain India and the other colonies,  and despite his courage and defiance of the Nazi tyranny, despite his holding on whilst German bombers blitzed London, he was forced to recognize the American peace would not include the maintenance of the British Empire.   After VE day, the Empire was on its way to dissolution.   No Army in the history of the world, except ours, sought just to come home without owning the territory it conquered.   Stalin did not agree.  He sought to expand its tyranny throughout Eastern Europe.  "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron curtain has descended across the continent," Churchill said in his famous 1947 speech in Fulton, Missouri at the invitation of Harry Truman.

 

The United States, instead, instituted the Marshall plan to rebuild a war-ravaged, starving, communist-threatened Europe.  If Trump instead of Truman had been in charge, he would handed over Western Europe in exchange for Notre Dame cathedral with a gold "Trump" slapped over the entrance and that the Bois de Boulogne fashioned into a Trump golf course, and announced his deal with great fanfare, that he alone saved democracy.

 

I have friends who are Trumpist Republicans and whose beliefs diverge from mine.  I struggle to talk to them; they evince a selfishness and lack of empathy.  Can they really be so self-serving?   Can the economic perception of the preservation of their wealth through Trump be real?   Are they all racists?   Are they afraid of a minority-majority electorate?  Do they think that entrenched minority rule will not eventually degrade democracy? Do they really fear poor immigrants fleeing from oppression or worse?

 

I reminded one plutocratic friend who rails against demonstrators, that social movements generate change in societies.  The American Revolution, the Civil War, the Civil rights movement, the protests against the Viet Nam war all were the genesis of structural change.   The French Revolution, a violent undertaking, shook the foundations of European society, not to mention the following Napoleonic wars that changed the character of all of Europe.  Although bloody and horrific, Revolution resulted from the oppression of the lower castes, about whom royalty cared not a fig, "Let them eat cake" or as the GOP says, "raise your self up by the bootstraps," does not work for a vast number of unemployed who are in dire straits because of establishment indifference to transformational change and a raging, mishandled plague.   Many revolutions have begun with street demonstrations, called riots and suppressed by military and political forces...

 

No, violence is not good, and therein lies the reason why America must change structurally through socially peaceful means, almost like England did in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Sending Trump and Ivanka, "let them find something else to do," to the guillotine is not the solution, although it seems appealing in a gallows sort of way.  I dreamt of Trump being rolled through the streets of Washington standing on a tumbrel, wearing an18th century white night shirt, his arms tied before him, his balding orange hair having turned white as the horses clop down Pennsylvania Avenue on the way to his fate awaited by Madame la Guillotine posted by the Washington monument, trailing behind is Mitch McConnell, Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan, wrestling coach extraordinaire and defender of the crown, not to mention feigned pedophilia ignorance among  his colleagues at whatever high school or college that was.

 

Ivanka, her plastic face and sagging silicon implants, disheveled by her imprisonment and worry about her husband Jarad, who had been denounced by committee of Public Safety awaiting his turn the next day in the DC Jail (unfortunately no elegant Conciergerie in Washington, even though the town had been designed by a Frenchman).