Monday, June 25, 2018

Donald Trump is a racist leading our country toward disaster

"The Collector" by Damien Hirst
     Let’s consider the lives of a few average Chicagoans, chosen at random.
     There’s … John Wayne Gacy. He was … let’s see … a pedophile who murdered 33 boys and buried them in his crawl space. There’s …Richard Speck, who raped and killed eight student nurses in a single night of terror. A third? Umm, Jeffrey Dahmer was a Chicagoan — well, he actually lived in Milwaukee but once cruised down to Chicago to find a victim, which qualifies him. Not to forget typical Chicagoan H.H. Holmes, whose grisly killings during the World’s Columbian Exposition are chronicled in “The Devil in the White City.”
     Gosh, those typical Chicagoans are all mass murderers, aren’t they? Makes an impartial observer coolly assessing the facts suspect that Chicagoans are a pretty dangerous lot. I’m surprised anybody dares step foot in the city, packed as it is with brutal psychopaths and twisted killers.
     What’s that you say? This is not a random selection of Chicagoans? Rather, I’ve obviously cherry-picked these individuals specifically because of their depraved actions. That rather than representing the city as a whole, they are extreme exceptions. The vast majority of Chicagoans don’t kill anybody, ever, but are decent human beings just trying to live their lives as best they can.
    I was being deceptive, wasn’t I? And why would I do that?
     Maybe because we just witnessed an identical show of deception on the part of the President of the United States. Over the weekend, Donald Trump replied the national outcry at tearing immigrant children from their families with a loathsome display of deception, exactly along the lines demonstrated above. The president and the White House both firing off tweets of shocking crudity. Here’s one:
     “Laura Wilkerson lost her son Josh in 2010. He was tortured and beaten to death by an illegal alien.”
     And another:
     “We are gathered today to hear directly from the AMERICAN VICTIMS of ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.”


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16 comments:

  1. Title of a book I'll never write. "The Mango King Plays Songs of Hate".

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  2. its hard to swallow i know but it turns out we live in a country where a large segment of our fellow citizens are in favor of this nasty regressive bullshit that trump and his administration are pushing. it shouldn't surprise any of us that another bigoted racist is in the Whitehouse . he's not the first. sadly probably won't be the last.

    the tyranny of the majority, and make no mistake its possible these folks are a majority, is supposed to be overcome by the checks and balances built into our system of government. unfortunately the executive, legislative and possibly the judicial branch seem to be in the hands of these ass hats and we'll see if these smug moderate democrats can get people out in sufficient numbers at the midterms to wrestle some part of the government away from them.

    I've got my doubts. the focus on identity politics, the infighting between progressives and moderates makes me think we don't have a chance.

    I understand that as a member of the fourth estate its your job to write about this circumstance and comment on it in hopes of informing as many people as possible of the danger to our liberty. but this administration has done a surprisingly effective job of painting the media as biased and untruthful. so you gotta do better.

    you've said your not a reporter . your what then? a commentator? well find a different angle. cause you sound like a broken record and from what I can tell your message aint having much effect in this echo chamber . I got no advise on what you should say. I'm hoping you have some advice on what people can do to act effectively outside this solidly democrat city to effect change

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    1. I don't think you understand the purpose of daily journalism, FME. I "sound like a broken record" because the man elected on a platform of racial hate is now stirring it up. I can't write the column I had in mind—on Half-Price Books, I'm shooting for Wednesday—when classic racism is pouring forth from the official White House Twitter feed. I'm not in charge of the effect I am having or not having. If you don't like it, well, with all due respect, too fuckin' bad. Nobody forces you to read this. The Trump administration's efforts to paint the media as biased may be having a surprising effect on YOU. But others realize that he isn't lashing at the media because it's false, but because it's true.

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    2. Nope. Still a newspaper columnist with a blog. The blog is the labor of love or the hobby. The column feeds the bulldog--and most likely paid for Northwestern and Pomona, and soon, law school.

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    3. FME, you take more words to say nothing than any other commenter on this blog.

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  3. Right as usual, Neil.

    I would just add: Many of the people who go along with Trump on "illegal alien criminals" are also gun worshipers. (And worship they do, as Garry Wills stated in this classic essay.) They are beside themselves with indignation whenever anyone draws attention to the latest gun massacre; they howl that such "tragedies" are being "politicized" and that the vast majority of gun owners are responsible citizens, how dare anyone smear them by association with criminals and psychos, etc. And of course they merrily do exactly that with undocumented immigrants, blithely ignorant of any contradiction.

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    1. "Blithely ignorant of any contradiction" should be the Trump Administration's theme song. It would have to be in an atonal tune of course.

      john

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  4. The liars can figure all they like, but the figures don't lie. The year 2050 is as far away as today is from 1986, which seems like last week to many of us. By mid-century, whites will be a minority in this country. The white death rate is already surpassing the white birth rate. The bigots and the haters can't handle the numerical and statistical truth. Demography is destiny, and they are trying to stop the inevitable changes by keeping the immigrants and the refugees out, just as King Canute tried to prevent the tide from rolling in, or whatever the hell he did. Ain't gonna happen

    His Orangeness has already taken us over the cliff, and we are in free-fall. People of all races, ethnicities, religions, and classes are saying and doing things to one another that would have been unthinkable in the recent past. Whites playing the privilege card and dialing 911 when a black person parks in front of their house. Immigrants being set on fire for the crime of sleeping while homeless. Jews targeted for the same reason as always...because they're Jews...the same way sickos kill cats just for being cats.

    We are pointing a gun at our own heads and it is our own finger on our own trigger. Americans are going to eat each other alive, and the Russians and the Chinese are laughing at us. They know that they will be around to pick up the pieces when Il Douche and his followers turn America into toast. Burnt toast. Every day, week, and month, it appears more and more that America is going to self-destruct before it can be fixed and saved. Those who make peaceful solutions impossible will make a violent resolution inevitable.

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    1. Just a little thing, but King Cnut's point was to show the limitations of his rule, that nature was the greater power. Trump and his ilk will never have the capacity to do that.

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    2. The first step toward recovery is to admit that we have a problem. And then, VOTE!!!

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    3. Now that the Soo-preems have legalized GOP gerrymandering, I'm afraid it will take a lot more than voting, my friend. That route may already be closed. The detour is forty miles of bad road. Extremely bad road. And what's worse, it's mined.

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    4. Then I guess we'll be doing some off-roading, Grizz. We're Americans. We'll find a way.

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  5. Mike Godwin said it best: "By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you."

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  6. A family document dating from the 1920's concerning a social service agency my grandmother worked for contained a plea for tolerance of dangerous foreigners in our midst, arguing that despite their tendency to violence they loved their children. These non-Americans recently come to our shores were -- ITALIANS.

    A tragic aspect of the flight from central America is that it probably embodies many of the people those countries can least afford to lose. Small business people fleeing from extortionists.

    Tom

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    1. My dad's grandparents were from Sicily on his father's side, and Norway on his mother's side. An odd mix, wouldn't you say? That's what's great about America. Glad there weren't any walls around the country back then. Trump is doing his damnedest to fuck it all up.

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  7. An afterthought about a few omissions from your catalogue of Chicago-connected killers. Don't know if it was true or not, but I was told a former occupant of my first dorm room at the U. of C. was William Heirens. And then there were those crazy kids Leopold and Loeb.

    Tom

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