Takedown

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill. 

Wendell Berry, Questionnaire

I remember black and white television, the V of the antenna protruding from the rear of the set. We got channel 13 from Los Angeles, the big city to the south of Santa Barbara, and on channel 13 we watched roller-derby with the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, boxing from the Olympic Auditorium, and professional wrestling. This was long before WWE took off and became a huge phenomenon, but the basic characters and storylines were similar, good guys and villains. The good guys fought fair, played by the rules, and with the villians it was anything goes. The only wrestler I remember was a good guy named Bobo Brazil, a black man with huge biceps and pecs and astonishing agility and athleticism. 

The crowd went wild when Bobo climbed into the ring against that night’s villain. Bobo usually started fast, with fancy footwork and a two-footed drop kick that decked the villain, but after taking some pummeling the villain always mounted a comeback, usually be jamming a thumb in Bobo’s eye or smacking him in the nuts. The villain would get Bobo on the canvas or pinned against the ropes and hammer away with a torrent of blows that no normal human could hope to survive. Bam! Bobo goes face first into the turnbuckle. Bam! Bobo gets body slammed. Bam! Bobo sails over the top rope and into the first row of spectators. Big Bobo would collapse on the canvas and the villain would pounce on his chest and try to pin him, but after a two count Bobo bucked the villian off and staggered to his feet. Knowing Bobo was dazed, the villain went in for the kill, karate chopping Bobo in the neck and slinging him against the ropes, then flattening him on the rebound with a wicked body block. Just when you thought Bobo was a goner, he rallied and launched a counterattack. Energized by the crowd, Bobo tossed his adversary around like a rag doll until he begged for mercy. With the crowd in a frenzy Bobo pinned the villain, proving once again that cheaters and bad guys don’t win in the end. 

But they do, or so it seems. A con man is President of the United States. The Attorney General of the United States is so consumed with kissing Trump’s flabby white ass that he forgets his oath of office. The Republican Party stomps on its moral compass and then tosses it from the top of Trump Tower. Democrats bicker among themselves, wring their hands, play the purity game, suck up to corporate donors and bow before the Israel lobby. Energy company lobbyists ransack the EPA. ICE agents terrorize little children. It’s a damn certainty that the US is going to launch a military strike against Iran.While Trump uses racial animosity to pit people against each other and completely distract and divide the nation, his bagmen and cronies line up to raid the treasury. The bad guys are like looters, smashing windows and making off with whatever they can carry; sirens wail, but when the police finally arrive they help the looters instead of arresting them. “Hey, Raytheon, yeah, we’ll pay $40,000 for a toilet seat. C’mon Goldman Sachs, feel free to take some risks, we’ll be here to bail you out. What you need, Exxon-Mobil, is another fat government subsidy! Let’s get you set up.”  

What tickles me most about Republicans is their sanctimonious hypocrisy. You have to admire the size of their balls. Mitch McConnell’s nuts may be old and saggy but his sack still has weight. Imagine if Barack Obama made disparaging remarks about some GOP maven’s grandmother; he’d of been lynched, either figuratively or literally, with Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham leading the charge of the Virginia chapter of the KKK. Trump’s base carry torches and shout “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us,” while Trump gives Bibi Netanyahu a blowjob and does everything he can to help the Israeli government replace the Palestinians. 

When Trump and his crew of miscreants finish raping America, Trump will build a Presidential Library, a gleaming monument to himself, that will of course be the largest, most expensive, most spectacular presidential library ever --many times more spectacular than Obama’s or Bill Clinton’s -- but what’s this library going to hold? Videos of Trump’s weird Nuremberg-style campaign rallies? Unedited collections of his insane Tweets? His collection of love letters from Kim Jong-Un? His golf clubs, a Confederate flag, a sword from Saudia Arabia, an NRA banner, maybe a Budweiser can autographed by Brett Kavanaugh? The first MAGA cap? A statue of Ivanka? 

The good guys are reeling, blood dripping on the canvas. How many more kicks in the ribs and stomps on our heads can we take? If only we could wipe the blood from our eyes and focus on the real villains, those fuckers in the expensive suits and shiny shoes, every last one of them sporting an American flag lapel pin. Ain’t hard to rob a bank when you own the damn thing.