-by Frank Macdonald
It was weird to wake up on January 1st to see women wearing seams on their nylons and men clad in fedoras and trench coats. I thought I was still dreaming the old year away, one of those dreams where you find yourself cast in a black and white film from 1939.
But it wasn’t a dream.
And it wasn’t in black and white. It was in technicolor…but are any films shot in technicolor any more?
At any rate, it was in full colour, but not spanning the big screen that used to entertain us at the Victoria Theatre. It was on the little screen, the one we couldn’t even imagine way back then, back when war movies were about things that had already happened. And the Allies kicked the hell out of a creature called Hitler.
It was not a movie, but newscasts depicting an evil old man flexing his flaccid muscles for all the world to see. And the world did see. It saw the unimaginable begin to take shape. The United States of America, a two and a half century beacon of freedom whose beckoning light has suddenly flickered out. The flame held aloft by the Statue of Liberty doused.
In its place stood an aging former reality television character, probably in the early to middle stages of dementia, suffering from bone spurs ever since the Vietnam War, telling the world just how it is going to be for the rest of us from now on.
In this version of reality tv, the plot, so far, presents proof that the stupidest man on the planet can also become its most powerful.
But is he?
Granted, he was elected in a democratic election, a form of government that Trump plans to make the stuff of mythology, a vaguely remembered rumour about how people once upon a time freely elected their leaders.
But it is not enough for him to invade his own cities, to arrest anyone who is the colour of his racism. He wants to be emperor. In that pursuit, he has already taken Venezuela. He now talks about Columbia, Greenland, Mexico. Oh, and of course, that resource-rich 51st state called Canada.
While he is pondering (or pretending to think) about which nation on his Monopoly board he will want to take next, his masters will actually do the deciding for him. People like Stephen Miller, current political advisor serving as White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security. Miller and people like him, have searched for, and groomed Trump to believe he personally matters in all the chaos being created.
Donald Trump is exactly the kind of mindless moron that people like Stephen Miller and company knew they could manipulate into thinking…correction…Trump could never be accused of ever thinking…but the kind of man Stephen Miller and company were looking for. Someone between a marionette and a ventriloquist’s puppet.
Trump does not like rainbows, whether they are 2SLGBTQ or communities composed of brown, black, yellow or mixed people, so mass deportations have begun in that country.
Watching that paramilitary group of masked men and women who operate under the acronym ICE, it becomes easier, and more scary, to answer a question frequently asked throughout the last half of the last century: Where did Hitler find the men and women who were so willing to carry out the extermination efforts of the Jews and so many other nationalities?
They can be found anywhere, apparently, even in America where they can coldly shoot a woman in the face in public. It was a cold-blooded killing which the entire nation witnessed. And then witnessed government leaders lie straight-faced about how it was Renee Nicole Good’s own fault.
In the past week, Trump’s handlers’ ambitions have become more vivid. He says he will use the world’s most powerful military, formerly the finest defence the world had against an outbreak of global hostilities, in any fashion and against any country that so much as tries to even economically compete with American business (or Oval Office bribery) interests.
The present federal government in the US is trying to cleanse itself genetically. Like the Nazis, its agency of extermination, ICE, is gathering anyone whose skin colour is offensive, and shipping them off to a living hell on earth such as prisons in El Salvador. They aren’t gas chambers, but who is to say what the next stage of Trump’s hatred will bring.
Meanwhile, Trump is destroying that nation’s education system through the banning of any books that features characters who are not Ku Klux Klan candidates.
Here in our still sovereign country, Canadians need to prepare ourselves to oppose any effort to erect a Trump Tower north of the 49th.
Sadly, the movie into which I woke this morning shows no signs of coming to an end soon. Not unless that last minute American movie gimmick called the calvary, disguised as next November’s Democrats, charge to that nation’s, and the western hemisphere’s, rescue.
Still it is difficult, in these difficult times, not to think of, read or re-read that eulogy for two millennium of Christian/Western civilization. Written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, and titled The Second Coming, it is a poem that ends with an ominous question:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?