Last night I couldn’t sleep.
I had received a lot of requests from friends and fam to boycott the Inauguration by not watching it. But I went ahead and did it anyway. You might as well be telling a nest of mosquitos, “listen, there’s this real bright light out there hanging on a porch, but whatever you do don’t look at it, and for god sakes don’t fly near it. It’s dangerous!”
Well, I couldn’t sleep last night cause I got zapped!
I couldn’t watch all of it, all the pomp and circumstance, but I did, regrettably, watch the speech itself. I only regret it because I needed some sleep and it left me sleepless, speechless, and shook. It was a very disturbing speech.
Till yesterday I simply did not fully feel the surrealness of this era we’ve entered.
Everything I’ve ever felt about Trump came back to me, went through me, and then vanished completely. A mixed bag of feelings.
For example, he DID represent money and power and greed and the gilded lifestyle of the rich and famous. In other words, he represented the most seductive aspects of the American dream, a dream that unfortunately guides the thoughts and actions of so many Americans, including mine for a very long time.
He WAS synonymous with a lifestyle I didn’t so much aspire to as I did envy in a twisted way, to watch fights from the front row in a casino with your name atop it, your name on the floor of the ring, your name ringing in everyone’s ears, you being the winner regardless of the winner of the match. I LIKED that!
And later when my idea of what rich and powerful is shifted a bit from the bling bling gaudiness of a Trump, to the geeky plaid shirt and blue jean philanthropic Bill Gates billionaire look, I begin to group Trump in more with the new money shamelessly run amok crowd.
Later, once I got more info on him and realized he was mostly image, bankrupt and bailed out again and again, I admired him a little more for pimping his name for its worth, for turning misfortune and failure into fortunes, and building an entertainment empire with little more than an image and the fruits of his insecurities (the latter something I had quite a bit of myself back then).
Anyway, all of those kind of assessments of him were swept away by that speech yesterday.
I remember the first time I realized that many Americans were comfortable with the idea of a Trump presidency, even more than they were with a Sarah Palin vice-presidency. And from that moment I started considering what a win by Trump might mean for America.
Well, for one, it would definitely put an end to all the ridiculous talk about a post-racial era, done by smug white liberal friends or these oblivious Generation Y kids. To me, that would be a good thing. Can’t resolve a problem when half the nation thinks there’s no problem to resolve. I figured, with him in command, there’d be no more looking at the morally ransacked and ratched ass shamble of a house on a hill that America is with rosy lenses…uh uh. Now everyone will see that we’ve been painting over rotted wood, thoroughly feasted upon by termites of racism for over 400 years; that we’ve been wrapping fully rusted piping with rags, and catching the leaks in buckets for centuries, foregoing repair, foregoing renovation, in favor of romanticizing this house.
Trump would be just what America needed to see what black people, and many non-white people, see every day.
That thought fueled a few posts on Facebook. Maybe I even lost a few friends and family over my positions. I didn’t care. Fuck it. Change is painful sometimes.
Pain was all over the internet, all over the media, reaching a plateau around election day, and then ascending even higher.
People were fully vested in the idea that America was headed in the right direction. As vested as white Americans were in Roosevelt’s New Deal, or in Truman’s GI Bill (acts that served the enfranchised well, but the disenfranchised, not so much, but are continuously held up as examples of American greatness).
People were also fully vested in that fresh coat of lead-free paint Obama had given the house, and the beautiful towels and buckets that Michelle and the kids picked out to manage the cracks and leakage from the corroded pipes. We believed somehow that the first family had actually refurbished it, made it a home for all of us, for the first time.
Even I was taken in, for a while.
I thought maybe I had been wrong about the house. Maybe it wasn’t as condemned as mounds of evidence has lead me to believe. Maybe it wasn’t fodder for a bonfire real Americans would dance around gleefully once it was truly set a flame.
But then I listened to Trump’s speech yesterday.
And I was shook.
Shook like I’ve never been shook by a president. I FINALLY saw the Trump that has been scaring people senseless. And I understood that even I wasn’t prepared for what I’d ironically been silently longing to see. His words spoke to me of this coming conflagration in no uncertain terms.
Trump stood before America’s seat of power, before a half dozen former heads of state, and said, “Y’all had your chance. Now it’s mine! And we’re gonna burn this bitch down, but good!” (I’m paraphrasing of course, but only by a little.) I’ve never imagined what such an agenda would sound like. Now I don’t have to. Trump has animated it, filled in its missing dimensions.
Yes, I was shook. I am officially spooked.
Not that I don’t think America still needs to be rebuilt from the ashes up. I do.
I just realized yesterday that I wasn’t quite prepared for what that would look like in real life. And now that I’ve seen it, I’m shook. I understand better why people fought so hard to keep this raggedy ass thing standing. Because the alternative is Trump, or someone of his ilk, coming along and giving it a proper torching, an inferno that will not only set aflame all of the things that made the house damn near unlivable for most, but also everything that made it slightly lovable.
It’ll all go up in flames together.
And that hurts. I felt the first sharp aches of that loss as Trump spoke.
Interestingly enough, that wasn’t what made me lose sleep, though. Not directly.
I think I had a particularly disturbing, but probably predictable, premonition. I could see how the tinders will be lit. Actually they were officially lit 8 years ago when Obama gave his inaugural speech.
I saw all the people who had a vision of America, and in no way did it have a non-white leader — EVER! To them that was as un-American as people feel Trump’s face on American money might one day be. And these people were compelled into action, drastic action, to “take America back”. They have their party, their leaders, their network, their advocates abroad, their lobbyists, what have you, all at their disposal.
They went to work, every day, more focused than ever!
They would burn down Obama and everything he stands for, his fancy paint job on their rotting planks, his fancy rags on their shitty plumping. They were tireless, aggressive, disrespectful, and refused to take “Yes We Can” for an answer.
“No The Fuck We Can’t!!” they said everyday for 8 years, to every and anybody who’d listen…and many listened.
Because as surreal as it was for me, and many of us, to see Trump being sworn in as 45. it was for them to see Obama sworn in as 44.
And what does that mean, my sleepless mind kept asking me til the wee hours of this morning.
It means, almost naturally, that those who were most comfortable, who admired, who fought hard to stir the paint in the cans, to support the facelift Obama gave the house, that they, with Trump’s victory, have been shaken from their complacency, and politicized, galvanized, perhaps even militarized, and will do everything within their power to keep the house from falling into further disrepair, to save this condemned house.
In this sleepless state I saw the launch of a liberal version of the Tea Party.
I saw democrats arguing among themselves to find leadership that wasn’t pussy, that wasn’t afraid to get ugly, get dirty, get Trump-ish, to take the fight to the White House and delegitimize Trump to his face, but with the wherewithal to actually be successful at it…cause many will fall in the process. You can count on that!
Republicans are just better at this. They live for this shit.
The Republicans don’t have a Mommy Problem. They’re Daddy, even in most democratic eyes. When we needed a strong, safe country, Americans didn’t turn to the party legalizing gay marriage, marijuana, protecting women’s rights and social security. We went to the warriors / warmongers who give no fucks about you, your woman, nor your domestic partner and agenda…they love to make money, they love their guns, they love to make bombs (and drop them), shock and awe and dance in the blood of their enemies.
Most democrats can’t stomach that shit. Many will vote to allow it, of course, discontentedly (or profitably), but they won’t lead the charge.
So this liberal tea party will need to be a new breed of democrat, ones that will make Hillary’s hawkishness look like pacifism.
My mind kept playing with these ideas til damn near sunrise. Then I woke up, and wrote this post, semi-stream of conscious…
Just felt like I had to get this outta my system before my feelings get all jumbled up.
And just maybe I could get some sleep now.
Loco