All the bizarre and horrifying things he did are going to come back to us at random moments like half-remembered scraps of dreams.
"Am I wrong or did the president of the United States sit behind a truck just like a big boy and make honk honk sounds? Was that a real one or did I just ... OK he did? He did. Good. OK."
Now listen am I off here or did Trump make the joint chiefs pose for a fake situation room photo after all the shit was unplugged and make them pretend he was part of the successful op against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi while they all looked like they'd swallowed a live cat—he did! OK.
I know I dreamed the one where he stood framed dead center of a Kubrick-meets-John-Watters kitsch nightmare of fast food hillocks wearing a face that screamed "I'm a used car salesman who just murdered my wife and I'm about to shit my pants," that one didn't happen—what, really?
Now I *know* I'm making up the time he went to El Paso after a horrific gun massacre, turning a national tragedy into a gross photo op, capped by giving a shit eating grin thumbs up while posed with an infant orphaned by a gun policy he himself—WHAT?
Authorizing the brutality of protestors of brutality so that he could walk across the street and hold up a book he's never read so that conservative Christians would know that it was on their behalf that he had delivered the one thing they truly worship, which is state violence.
Fighting with the family of a fallen soldier ...
Fighting with a different family of a different fallen soldier ...
Giving Rush Fucking Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom ...
Suggesting that the reason for the mask shortages is because the medical professionals whose lives he is endangering are hording them ...
Gasping for air on the balcony, projecting a weak man's notion of strength, the horrifying implications of the phrase "one of the diers" ...
Pardoning Joe Arpaio, imprisoned for racist profiling, who ran concentration camps in the desert ...
The time he called Americans who died in war "suckers" and "losers" ...
Calling Haiti and African nations "shithole countries" ...
Selling access to himself at his gross country club for assholes ...
The unfathomable glee with which he and his pallid coterie of supremacist ghouls carried out the unfathomable cruelty of their family separation policy ...
Going to court to make the specific argument that children detained in his concentration camps should not have access to toothbrushes, soap, or other toiletries...
The time he trotted out his pale damp dead-eyed psycho killer of a senior advisor, Stephen Miller, to take a shit on the Statue of Liberty ...
The time when, upon being asked to repudiate Nazis, he told Nazis to "stand by" during a televised debate. apnews.com/article/electi…
The time he led them in a bloody insurrection to overturn an election he lost... fox5dc.com/video/887807
The time he lied to the nation for a year about the severity of a pandemic and a half a million people, disproportionately people of color, died. npr.org/2020/09/10/911…
The weird way he stands ...
The time he sabotaged his national pandemic response specifically because it would kill people from states where a majority of voters don't support him politically, which just so happen to also be disproportionally people of color. businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-…
Praising all the military dictators for being military dictators and all the killing ... politico.com/story/2017/05/…
The time he bragged about protecting a Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman from scrutiny after bin Salmon murdered journalist U.S. resident, and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi by dismembering him with a bone saw, citing our arms deal. vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/d…
Let’s pretend it’s deadly. Let’s say it’s a novel new strain of an old structure that we’ve known about for a long time.
Let’s imagine that one reason this virus spreads so effectively is because a large number of people who get it are asymptomatic.
Next, let’s pretend it’s discovered that the best way of containing such a virus is for everybody to agree, for the sake of those who are most vulnerable, to accept some inconvenience. Maybe wear a slightly uncomfortable face covering, or avoid travel when infection is high.
This is not the proclamation of an expert. This is the confession of a fool.
I should explain.
I wrote the words you’ll find between these covers after August 2017, which was a key date in my rapidly dawning awareness of the true nature of my country. the-reframe.com/very-fine-peop…
August 2017 is when tiki-torch waving Nazis invaded Charlottesville, Virginia, in defense of treasonous slaveholders and their own perceived supremacy.
August 2017 was also when the White Christian president defended those who marched with the Nazis as “very fine people.”
We know the Nazis were Nazis because they were chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil,” and all the other Nazi hits, and because they believed in Nazi causes and utilized Nazi symbology, and so on.
Hey everyone, Very Fine People releases on June 25, and the paperback version is available for presale right now! (eBook preorders will be available later this month.)
You can preorder it any of the places where books are sold, and if you go and order it you'll be doing the thing that helps authors more than anything else you can do. Preorders make bookstores and other instruments of publishing take notice.
I've been working on this book for about 7 years—almost certainly longer than you've been reading anything I write. I have thoughts and feelings about that, but first:
This link places a preorder for personalized signed editions.
Seven lessons learned from a quarter century in a war-oriented society.
It's 2001—the year the movies promised we'd make contact with aliens—and the United States has rather recently been attacked by terrorists who flew passenger planes into buildings.
I have a distinct memory from the day of the attacks, of a news anchor announcing—before the buildings even fell—that we were now at war, which we technically weren't yet; thanks to my high school civics class I knew that news anchors aren't empowered to declare war.
But sure enough, here in late 2001, old what's-his-name the news anchor has been proved right: we're heading to war in Afghanistan. Old what's-his-name knew, with the sage wisdom of somebody living in a war-oriented society; when you are attacked, war is not optional.
In 2017 American Nazis invaded Charlottesville, VA, which is a major U.S. city in case you didn't know. Maybe you remember this. They called themselves "Unite the Right." They wanted what Nazis want, and did what Nazis do, which was to kill.
They also wore polo shirts and held tiki torches, and chanted Nazi chants; about blood and soil, and others predicated on the idea that the white race was being replaced by races that Nazis view as inferior.
Probably it is worth talking about what 'the white race" means.
"The white race" is a pretend thing that certain people made up in order to consolidate social and political power and wealth by organizing the application of brutality and violence.
Anyway the Nazis believed they were white, and this was very important to them.
But we're often the sort of place that fails to maintain what it has built; mostly because maintenance costs eat into tax revenues, and revenues could be used for tax cuts, and tax cuts help profits, and profits are very important, so collapses are just a thing that is coming.
But even if we had performed adequate maintenance, the bridge was probably doomed. Dali is the size and mass of a skyscraper (far larger than container ships used to be—but larger ships lower prices in supply chains, and lower prices help profits, and profits are important).