Friday, January 15, 2016

What's It All Aboot?

For many of us it’s all aboot learning Canadian as a second language. The specter of being Trumped haunts our country. The more he is denounced, even by his own party, the higher go his numbers. His constituency laps up his mocking misogyny, racist slurs and flagrant deceit.

Hitler enjoyed the same mindless support. In fact Trump is said (by his ex-wife) to keep Mein Kampf at his bedside. He alternately rants, charms, bullies, boasts and insults. Hitler had that Chaplinesque mustache. Donald’s hair is the color and abundance of the Iowa wheat crop particularly on his frontal shelf. To my eyes it connotes well-rehearsed fakery.

But this is serious stuff. He has ventriloquized the grunts and groans of America, the curses of the down-trodden, the road-rage of truckers, even the quiet desperation of the guy flipping fries at McDonalds whose girlfriend walked out, car gave up and dog just died. Charlie lunch-box and Debbie Sue whose job went to Indonesia.

They like him because he’s a winner and they’re not. Maybe some loose change will fall out of his wallet. Or they can hear themselves in his bluster. He says it like it is. Black lives don’t matter. Nor do weak people. Nor does deliberation and truth-telling.

Trump will tell us whom to hate. Everyone who doesn’t look like you, starting with Obama, that’s who. Women who use the bathroom. Disgusting! That undocumented-olive-skin guy who parked your car.

He has sniffed the Zeitgeist. What if he is the nominee? Have we lost our grip? Is anti-establishment sentiment so strong? Democrats have Bernie but he is speaking substantively, truth to power. Trump is a merchant of deceit speaking from a pedestal of power promising a sky of pies.

Yes, yes the system is broken. Who broke it? Mitch McConnell when he vowed to oppose everything in Obama’s agenda. The big banks when they gambled recklessly and lost pension-fund millions.  The good old boys gerrymandering a lifetime annuity for a congress of fools. And a money-based system disenfranchising a large chunk of the electorate. 

What is needed is a constitutional convention to repair an ossified document. Otherwise many of us look toward our northern neighbor to see what they are all aboot.

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