Now the whirlwind

We’re in for it, now. After 8-years of non-stop obstructionism, the American people have rewarded the nihilist vandals who are the Republican Party by handing them a wrecking ball. And, so far as I can tell, the brown-shirted fools actually do believe they’re going to turn back the clock, that when the niggers and moozlims and fairies and dykes and kikes and educated women and the working-poor are all smashed back into their places — with a swagger stick, if necessary — why, everything will be great! Again!

The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.   — H.L. Mencken

What shocks, I suppose, is not that we have elected an appalling ignoramus, a man who can barely open his mouth without lying; we have done that before. What shocks is that we have elected a man so deeply, overtly, frankly, hostile to American ideals — a man who doesn’t even pay lip-service to freedom of the press, a man who strokes theocrats and proposes religious tests as a condition of citizenship, a man who promises to ride roughshod over separation of powers.

How is it even possible that so many Americans could know so little about their own country? Or 20^th-century history? Could so carelessly throw away the greatest gift of The Enlightenment and embrace the darkness of Medievalism?

The Klan believes its hour has struck, and they have sound reason to think so.

KKK on the bridge in Mebane, NC this morning 😪 pic.twitter.com/GcSQeUB3w9

— shorty guizman (@kelbi1lewis) November 9, 2016

It’s a safe bet that this human sewage feels pretty good this morning, too, and looks forward to setting about the business of making America great again.

I imagine these subhumans are gratified as well.

And recall this affecting passage from Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, written in Germany in the mid-30s and published in 1940.

After a while, however, in the midwatches of the night, behind thick walls and bolted doors and shuttered windows, it came to me full flood at last in confession sof unutterable despair. I don’t know why it was that people so unburdened themselves to me, a stranger, unless it was because they knew the love I bore them and their land. They seemed to feel a desperate need to talk to someone who would understand. The thing was pent up in them, and my sympathy for all things German had burst the dam of their reserve and caution. Their tales of woe and fear unspeakable gushed forth and beat upon my ears. They told me stories of their friends and relatives who had said unguarded things in public and disappeared without a trace, stories of the Gestapo, stories of neighbors’ quarrels and petty personal spite turned into political persecution, stories of concentration camps and pogroms, stories of rich Jews stripped and beaten and robbed of everything they had then denied the right to earn a pauper’s wage, stories of well-bred Jewesses despoiled and turned out of heir homes and forced to kneel and scrub off anti-Nazi slogans scribbled on the sidewalks while young barbarians dressed like soldiers formed a ring and prodded them with bayonets and made the quiet places echo with the shameless laughter of their mockery. It was a picture of the Dark Ages come again — shocking beyond belief, but true as the hell that man forever creates for himself.

The ‘exceptionalist’ crowd, it turns out, is exceptional for only its ignorance and malice.

If, against the evidence, there should prove to be a scintilla of ordinary human decency inside Donald Trump, an impulse toward American expansiveness and generous-spiritedness, and if he has the strength of character to try to assert it … what difference would it make? Those Klansmen et. al. will just howl that even The Donald betrayed them, that he has gone uptown on ’em — and console themselves with the thought that Trump won a majority, that they have the country with them, that their sick feverish vision is widely shared.

Hell, Paul Ryan, craven weasel, is already saying it.

We are headed toward a dark and scary time in our national life; comparisons to 1930s Germany, to Mussolini’s promise (failed, incidentally) to make the trains run on time, are only slightly inapt and eminently fair in spirit. Certainly, knowingly, deliberately, we have turned our back on our heritage and chosen an ignorant and mean-spirited authoritarianism, and the work of overcoming that will be the work of generations.

UPDATE:   Snopes says the guys in the picture above are NOT the Klan; that the photo was taken last night, not this morning; and they’re just a nice bunch of Trump supporters who like to wave a large, white, so-called Christian flag and who, from a distance, resemble Klansmen. Since Trump has explicitly called for a religious test as a condition of admission to the United States, I find that I’m unable to consider that an improvement.