Mary Sisney's Blog - Posts Tagged "matt-gaetz"
Distractions, Denials, Revisions, And Reversals: How White Supremacists Win
As I watched commemorations and commentary on events that happened 100 years ago while dealing with current events, I felt as if I were in an everything old is new again Ground Hog Decade or Century. News commentators discussed how the Tulsa terrorist attack on the area called Black Wall Street in 1921 was either not reported or was covered as a race riot where (in one Oklahoma newspaper) blacks were the villains while Trump-worshipping Republicans and conservative news media either tried to ignore the 1/6/21 white terrorist attack on our Capitol or portrayed the insurrectionists as patriots, tourists, and (in the most ridiculous fantasy) BlackLivesMatter and Antifa activists posing as Trump supporters. As I battled the employees of a corrupt, racist property management company (Condominium Management Services) and the “fixer” lawyers (Kriger Law firm) who enable them, I learned about the theft of a black family’s land in Huntington Beach 100 years ago. And as I heard about plans for Republican politicians to ban the study of critical race theory in public schools while bigots like Megyn Kelly removed their children from private schools to protect them from learning the truth about racism in the not so United States of America, I remembered that in the 19th Century it was illegal for blacks to learn to read and write and that toward the end of the 20th Century there was the “cultural literacy” versus multiculturalism debate among academics, where those of us who wanted to expand and diversify the canon had to deal with know-it-all white male educators like Allan Bloom (THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, 1987) and E.D. Hirsch, Junior (CULTURAL LITERACY, 1987) who thought they could determine what all of us needed to know, no matter who we were, where we lived, and what career we planned to pursue. It’s clear that the more America and some Americans change, the more racists stay the same. The more historians, teachers, and journalists reveal the truth about our racist past and present, the more racists try to deny, distract, and revise the truth. And the more we progress toward a more moral and perfect union, that “promised land” where all people are treated equal, the more white supremacists like politicians Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham, so-called journalists like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, and organizations like the KKK, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers try to reverse our progress. That’s why white supremacists are still winning.
Of course, despite the white supremacists’ attempts to obstruct and sabotage us, we have made considerable progress toward racial equity since the 19th and 20th Centuries. Black people not only can read and write, we can also teach white students how to read and write. And we can write history and literature, sometimes revising the stories told by white writers. In my 20th Century American Literature classes, I usually paired what I called “dominant culture” (i.e. white) texts with those written by blacks or other writers of color, showing how the white texts were revised. Richard Wright’s NATIVE SON (1940), for instance, revises Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925), and August Wilson’s FENCES (1985) revises Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949). But white writers can also revise writers of color as I showed with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s GREAT GATSBY (1925) and James Weldon Johnson’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN (1912). Through his portrait of Gatsby, Fitzgerald showed that even a white man couldn’t just show up in New York society and be accepted by the rich white folks the way the ex-coloured man was when he passed for white in Johnson’s novel. Fitzgerald’s response to Johnson’s tale of a black man passing for white, marrying a wealthy, beautiful “lily white” woman (who dies after having two children), and living successfully as a businessman is similar to the response of some contemporary white journalists to the 1619 project, a version of American history that focuses on slavery instead of Christopher Columbus, the Puritans, and the Founding Fathers. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the black female journalist who developed that project, was just denied tenure at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her scholarship has been viciously attacked by mostly white men who are probably as bothered by her race and gender as they are by the truths she revealed about American history. Some revisionists are even suggesting that slavery was good for blacks (even a few black fools are making that point) and/or that the Southerners were really the ones who wanted to free the slaves.
While the journalists and commentators (historians, politicians, educators) that I watch mostly on MSNBC are currently rejecting attempts to revise history and deny the truth about American racism, they are still too easily distracted by news that doesn’t matter as much as the dangers of white supremacist terrorism and the attacks on our democracy by racist Republican state legislators and governors, which represent the most serious attempt to reverse progress toward a truly equal American society since Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow at the end of the 19th Century. Last week, the MSNBC anchors planned to spend most of May 25 focused on the anniversary of George Floyd’s becoming a civil rights martyr. They announced these plans in advance. “Coincidentally,” on that day someone in the Manhattan district attorney’s office leaked the information that a grand jury was being formed to investigate Trump. It wasn’t clear who leaked that information, which should not have been leaked, but I suspect it was a soft bigot (the information also could have been leaked earlier, and the soft bigot could have been the journalist who decided to publish it on the Floyd anniversary) who didn’t want to watch a whole day of news about a black man being murdered by a racist white cop. Instead of briefly mentioning the grand jury news and focusing on Floyd, the MSNBC anchors all threw away their scripts and focused on Trump; they spent at least half of their May 25 shows speculating about what was going to happen with the grand jury as if they couldn’t have that discussion the next day or the day after that since the jury probably won’t indict anyone for months. That distraction reminded me of the 2016 Hillary’s e-mails media distraction that allowed Trump to win the electoral college and the 2017 METOO media distraction that allowed us to ignore Charlottesville, the mass murders in Las Vegas, and the fact that a year earlier white women and white evangelicals voted for a confessed sexual assaulter because he promised to stop the browning of America. Even now some news media commentators are still being distracted by sex. Although no one (not even Rachel Maddow, who is practically hyperventilating) is more focused on how dangerous this attack on our democracy is than MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, she still had time in her one-hour (minus time for commercials) show this week to spend a segment on the Matt Gaetz sex scandal. Really? If Gaetz isn’t eating children and drinking their blood (which is possible since the Republicans project all of their sins onto Democrats), who cares about his sex life. The Republicans aren’t going to demand that he resign, and he’s not the one blocking the Republican Senators from voting for a 1/6 commission. Everyone needs to stay focused on the threats to our democracy and to the lives of people of color, Jews, and Muslims by white supremacists.
The murder of George Floyd by a racist cop was one of those “inflection” moments in American history that can lead to major change. I was astonished by how quickly everything changed last summer. Suddenly we were celebrating Juneteenth, Target and Walmart were carrying books about race, and Mitt Romney marched with the BlackLivesMatter protesters. White folks who thought they weren’t racist or who thought everything would be fine if we black folks and our too progressive white allies just stopped talking about race suddenly woke up and started talking about race; some apologized for being asleep for so long. Everyone was now saying what I’ve been saying for years. We’re not colorblind, and we don’t treat everyone the same. Like black lives and black votes, race does matter. Of course, there is always a backlash to change, and the more mostly nonblack people marched, and the more talk there was of race and racism, the more dangerous the white supremacists became. Like the trapped rat in the opening scene of NATIVE SON, they started attacking, leading finally to the 1/6/21 white terrorist attack on our Capitol by the unpatriotic, racist white people I call TRASH (see 1/17/21 blog post).
Of course, we’d been moving toward that attack since at least the eighties, the last period when a major reversal of progress toward equality occurred. The election of Ronald Reagan, the attack on affirmative action, and the rise of groups like the skinheads during the eighties all were leading to Donald Trump and the Proud Boys in the 2020’s. The failure to tell the truth about racism in the past allowed racists to hide in plain sight during the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, eventually enabling not so secret white supremacist (in the eighties he took out newspaper ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five and said on television that he wanted people to hate those very young, too dark for some people’s taste falsely accused boys/young men) Trump to move into the White House and start undermining our democracy.
Our democracy continues to be in danger, so it’s important that we stay focused on telling the truth about the racism of the past and the present. We all need to do our part—teachers, journalists, documentarians, athletes, actors, musicians, and other celebrities. We social media warriors also need to keep posting and tweeting the truth. I’m encouraging several celebrities (LeBron James, who executive produced one of the Tulsa documentaries, Spike Lee, who has produced at least three great documentaries, and Michael Moore, who won an Oscar for his documentary attacking Bush’s wars) to produce a documentary on the mirror image dates 1/6/20 and 6/1/21. I’ve also suggested that everyone should make this June 14, Flag Day and Trump’s birthday, Pro-Democracy and Pro-Voting Rights Day. The Vice President and President should make speeches explaining how we can show our love for the flag (not by hugging and kissing it) by protecting our democracy and making it easier for all eligible American citizens to vote.
Too often the white supremacists have won the propaganda war. It’s time that the “real” Americans, the true patriots, start winning by telling the truth about our past and our present so that we can progress toward a more just, equitable, multicultural, mixed race future.
Of course, despite the white supremacists’ attempts to obstruct and sabotage us, we have made considerable progress toward racial equity since the 19th and 20th Centuries. Black people not only can read and write, we can also teach white students how to read and write. And we can write history and literature, sometimes revising the stories told by white writers. In my 20th Century American Literature classes, I usually paired what I called “dominant culture” (i.e. white) texts with those written by blacks or other writers of color, showing how the white texts were revised. Richard Wright’s NATIVE SON (1940), for instance, revises Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925), and August Wilson’s FENCES (1985) revises Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949). But white writers can also revise writers of color as I showed with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s GREAT GATSBY (1925) and James Weldon Johnson’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN (1912). Through his portrait of Gatsby, Fitzgerald showed that even a white man couldn’t just show up in New York society and be accepted by the rich white folks the way the ex-coloured man was when he passed for white in Johnson’s novel. Fitzgerald’s response to Johnson’s tale of a black man passing for white, marrying a wealthy, beautiful “lily white” woman (who dies after having two children), and living successfully as a businessman is similar to the response of some contemporary white journalists to the 1619 project, a version of American history that focuses on slavery instead of Christopher Columbus, the Puritans, and the Founding Fathers. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the black female journalist who developed that project, was just denied tenure at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her scholarship has been viciously attacked by mostly white men who are probably as bothered by her race and gender as they are by the truths she revealed about American history. Some revisionists are even suggesting that slavery was good for blacks (even a few black fools are making that point) and/or that the Southerners were really the ones who wanted to free the slaves.
While the journalists and commentators (historians, politicians, educators) that I watch mostly on MSNBC are currently rejecting attempts to revise history and deny the truth about American racism, they are still too easily distracted by news that doesn’t matter as much as the dangers of white supremacist terrorism and the attacks on our democracy by racist Republican state legislators and governors, which represent the most serious attempt to reverse progress toward a truly equal American society since Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow at the end of the 19th Century. Last week, the MSNBC anchors planned to spend most of May 25 focused on the anniversary of George Floyd’s becoming a civil rights martyr. They announced these plans in advance. “Coincidentally,” on that day someone in the Manhattan district attorney’s office leaked the information that a grand jury was being formed to investigate Trump. It wasn’t clear who leaked that information, which should not have been leaked, but I suspect it was a soft bigot (the information also could have been leaked earlier, and the soft bigot could have been the journalist who decided to publish it on the Floyd anniversary) who didn’t want to watch a whole day of news about a black man being murdered by a racist white cop. Instead of briefly mentioning the grand jury news and focusing on Floyd, the MSNBC anchors all threw away their scripts and focused on Trump; they spent at least half of their May 25 shows speculating about what was going to happen with the grand jury as if they couldn’t have that discussion the next day or the day after that since the jury probably won’t indict anyone for months. That distraction reminded me of the 2016 Hillary’s e-mails media distraction that allowed Trump to win the electoral college and the 2017 METOO media distraction that allowed us to ignore Charlottesville, the mass murders in Las Vegas, and the fact that a year earlier white women and white evangelicals voted for a confessed sexual assaulter because he promised to stop the browning of America. Even now some news media commentators are still being distracted by sex. Although no one (not even Rachel Maddow, who is practically hyperventilating) is more focused on how dangerous this attack on our democracy is than MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, she still had time in her one-hour (minus time for commercials) show this week to spend a segment on the Matt Gaetz sex scandal. Really? If Gaetz isn’t eating children and drinking their blood (which is possible since the Republicans project all of their sins onto Democrats), who cares about his sex life. The Republicans aren’t going to demand that he resign, and he’s not the one blocking the Republican Senators from voting for a 1/6 commission. Everyone needs to stay focused on the threats to our democracy and to the lives of people of color, Jews, and Muslims by white supremacists.
The murder of George Floyd by a racist cop was one of those “inflection” moments in American history that can lead to major change. I was astonished by how quickly everything changed last summer. Suddenly we were celebrating Juneteenth, Target and Walmart were carrying books about race, and Mitt Romney marched with the BlackLivesMatter protesters. White folks who thought they weren’t racist or who thought everything would be fine if we black folks and our too progressive white allies just stopped talking about race suddenly woke up and started talking about race; some apologized for being asleep for so long. Everyone was now saying what I’ve been saying for years. We’re not colorblind, and we don’t treat everyone the same. Like black lives and black votes, race does matter. Of course, there is always a backlash to change, and the more mostly nonblack people marched, and the more talk there was of race and racism, the more dangerous the white supremacists became. Like the trapped rat in the opening scene of NATIVE SON, they started attacking, leading finally to the 1/6/21 white terrorist attack on our Capitol by the unpatriotic, racist white people I call TRASH (see 1/17/21 blog post).
Of course, we’d been moving toward that attack since at least the eighties, the last period when a major reversal of progress toward equality occurred. The election of Ronald Reagan, the attack on affirmative action, and the rise of groups like the skinheads during the eighties all were leading to Donald Trump and the Proud Boys in the 2020’s. The failure to tell the truth about racism in the past allowed racists to hide in plain sight during the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, eventually enabling not so secret white supremacist (in the eighties he took out newspaper ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five and said on television that he wanted people to hate those very young, too dark for some people’s taste falsely accused boys/young men) Trump to move into the White House and start undermining our democracy.
Our democracy continues to be in danger, so it’s important that we stay focused on telling the truth about the racism of the past and the present. We all need to do our part—teachers, journalists, documentarians, athletes, actors, musicians, and other celebrities. We social media warriors also need to keep posting and tweeting the truth. I’m encouraging several celebrities (LeBron James, who executive produced one of the Tulsa documentaries, Spike Lee, who has produced at least three great documentaries, and Michael Moore, who won an Oscar for his documentary attacking Bush’s wars) to produce a documentary on the mirror image dates 1/6/20 and 6/1/21. I’ve also suggested that everyone should make this June 14, Flag Day and Trump’s birthday, Pro-Democracy and Pro-Voting Rights Day. The Vice President and President should make speeches explaining how we can show our love for the flag (not by hugging and kissing it) by protecting our democracy and making it easier for all eligible American citizens to vote.
Too often the white supremacists have won the propaganda war. It’s time that the “real” Americans, the true patriots, start winning by telling the truth about our past and our present so that we can progress toward a more just, equitable, multicultural, mixed race future.
Comical Race Theory: THEY CANNOT BE SERIOUS!
I’m not sure why Mindy Kaling decided to have legendary tennis player and former Superbrat John McEnroe narrate her new Netflix comedy “Never Have I Ever.” With his long curly hair, Superbrat McEnroe of the late seventies and early eighties looked more like a not so little, darker-haired Orphan Annie than he did the young females of color starring in Kaling’s show. The show is funnier without the comments of an older, wiser, quieter McEnroe. However, the 20th Century younger, crazier, louder McEnroe would be the perfect narrator for this absurd anti-democracy, white supremacy, reality television period in American history. Even before white evangelicals and white women voted for a self-proclaimed sexual assaulter, thrice-married, low-rated reality television star to be PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, I would occasionally channel 20th Century McEnroe when a wily politician (not always a conservative one) was dodging an interviewer’s question. In my best loud Superbrat voice I would shout, “ANSWER THE QUESTION, JERK!” As I’ve grown older (like Biden), I try to shout less to save my vocal cords and blood pressure, but I often want to shout another Superbrat McEnroe classic, “YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS” as I watch what’s happening in our politics, culture, and even my personal life today. I’ve made the point several times recently that I wouldn’t have survived (even thrived) in white institutions for 48 years if I didn’t have a good sense of humor. I told my high school classmates in a Facebook discussion of systemic racism that I would have died of a heart attack or stroke or been in jail for murder if I hadn’t been able to laugh at some of the racist shenanigans of administrators and my colleagues in the Cal Poly Pomona English and Foreign Languages Department. I’m still occasionally able to laugh at the absurd racists who are trying to destroy our democracy and who are harassing me, but it’s getting harder.
When a corrupt fixer lawyer at the Kriger Law firm responded to my spreading the news (to a local newspaper reporter and a foreclosing company) of the racism of the property management company CMS (Condominium Management Services) by telling a lie about what I “allegedly” said in a 2016 meeting—“I won’t serve with those two white women”—I was initially enraged and ready (once again) to drag neighbors and former neighbors who attended the meeting into this years-long corrupt, racist mess, but I soon found the lie hysterically funny. I had even more fun writing a scathing letter to the ridiculous lawyer, complimenting him on his use of the “ass-covering” modifier “allegedly” and chastising him for trying to bully me with what I called a Pee Wee Herman “I know you are, but what am I” lie. Racists, even educated ones, tend to be less clear-thinking than even not so well-educated people of color and their less racist white allies. The racists involved in the Bungalows War mess continue to underestimate my intelligence while I continue to outwit them. They cling to their racist theory that black women, especially older ones born in the Jim Crow South, are stupid and so can be intimidated and played by their lawyer jargon.
Most of the racists I encounter on Twitter and Facebook aren’t as well-educated as the foolish Kriger lawyer, so I try to be more patient and less brutal in my witty takedowns of them. Intellectual bullies can be as obnoxious as physical or politically/economically powerful ones. But when social media bigots call me ignorant, I weaponize their grammar/editing errors and blow them up. One troll responded to my comment about Trump’s knowing less about “the system” than a fifth grader (this was on a Brian Williams video site, so any conservatives commenting were trolling) with “your some kind of ignorant.” I shot back, “I’m the kind of ignorant that knows the difference between “your” and “you’re.’” A troll commenting on my response to a Jim Acosta tweet asked me if I was a “freaking teacher” after I called him out for several errors. I responded, “I’m a freaking retired English teacher.” My response to the Acosta tweet about not insulting clowns activated several trolls, but most of them dropped out after one or two verbal punches from me. They realized that they were punching above their weight. But two hung around for days, debating me on such issues as immigration, taxes, Barack Obama’s competence, real religion and birth place, and Joe Biden’s “alleged” dementia. They were responding to my comment that comparing Trump to clowns, pigs, and toddlers was insulting to all of them, so we should call him an alien since he calls people coming across our southern border “illegal aliens.” I had fun asking if Ivana and Melania Trump were “legal aliens.”
While most of what is being said and done during this anti-democracy, white supremacy period is absurd, it’s not always amusing. There is nothing funny about a rich white man who didn’t have one grandparent born in America and four of whose five children have foreign-born mothers being allowed to appoint himself Captain America with the right to determine who is and who is not a “real” American and who should and who should not go back to their ancestors’ country. And there’s certainly nothing funny about a born-rich white man whose mother is from Scotland and whose father’s first language was German (according to niece Mary) winning the Republican nomination and the electoral college because he said that his half-black predecessor, whose white maternal relatives (the people who raised him) were from Kansas, was really born in Kenya and because he promised to build a wall to keep the brown “rapists and drug dealers” that Mexico was “sending us” from coming to America.
There’s also nothing funny about the absurd racist claim that the mostly peaceful BLM protesters, who were more likely to be victims of rioting police officers than violent rioters, were terrorists and anarchists while the real terrorists and anarchists, the insurrectionists who tried to stage a coup on 1/6 and were hunting Mike Pence to hang him and Nancy Pelosi to shoot her in the head, are being compared to tourists. I laughed at Officer Hodges’ comment during the first 1/6 hearing that if that’s how American tourists act no wonder people in other countries don’t like them, but calling black people anarchists and terrorists endangers our lives while racist white people can beat and attack hundreds of cops, leaving more than 140 injured, some of them severely/permanently and still portray the one person killed by a cop defending the Capitol as a martyr because she’s a white woman. It’s absurd that the cops were being beaten with BlueLivesMatter flags, but it’s not funny. It’s absurd that the anchors on Fox, who kept replaying the most violent scenes during the 93% peaceful protests last summer, calling for law and order and defending the cops beating, pepper spraying, and shooting protesters and journalists with rubber bullets, were actually ridiculing those heroic cops who saved our democracy and the lives of Democratic and Republican politicians as well as staff, janitors, and other people doing their jobs that day, but it’s not funny. Laura Ingraham, possibly the worst blonde not named Ivanka, actually gave out acting awards to those four police officers (two of them white) who were describing their traumatic experiences. I gave her (on Twitter) the worst performance by a Karen award and suggested she compete on “Dancing with the Stars” since she probably can dance better than her colleague Tucker Carlson, the worst dancer to ever appear on that show.
Most of the events of this past week were not funny, but the appearance of the goofy G-Squad of Goons—Gaetz, Greene, and Gohmert—at the Washington jail so they could inspect the conditions of the cells where the Terrorists/Traitors, Racists, Anarchists, Seditionists, and Hoodlums (TRASH) were being housed did tickle my funny bone. I suggested the goons might actually be checking out the accommodations because they knew they would be there soon. As I was comfort-reading a fun book about the so-called “real housewives” (many of whom aren’t married), I imagined a confrontation between three women who have been paid to be reality tv stars and the G-Squad, who should be paid for their absurd made-for-television antics, but not for badly representing their constituents. Since Greene is from Georgia, it would be appropriate for three of the more rambunctious Atlanta Housewives to confront them at the jail. I would cast lawyer/mortician Phaedra, big mouth bully NeNe, and shady beauty queen Kenya to serve as the welcoming committee the next time the goofy goons appear outside the jail. If he can reproduce his eighties voice, McEnroe can serve as narrator of that potentially hilarious confrontation.
I wish the election of an insane, white supremacist, reality tv host “alien” was a joke. And I wish the birther nonsense and the voter suppression activities were jokes. But they’re not, so the media, as well as American citizens and voters, must take the threat to our democracy seriously. The white supremacists are serious, so we must battle them seriously. But we can laugh while we’re battling. Right, McEnroe?
When a corrupt fixer lawyer at the Kriger Law firm responded to my spreading the news (to a local newspaper reporter and a foreclosing company) of the racism of the property management company CMS (Condominium Management Services) by telling a lie about what I “allegedly” said in a 2016 meeting—“I won’t serve with those two white women”—I was initially enraged and ready (once again) to drag neighbors and former neighbors who attended the meeting into this years-long corrupt, racist mess, but I soon found the lie hysterically funny. I had even more fun writing a scathing letter to the ridiculous lawyer, complimenting him on his use of the “ass-covering” modifier “allegedly” and chastising him for trying to bully me with what I called a Pee Wee Herman “I know you are, but what am I” lie. Racists, even educated ones, tend to be less clear-thinking than even not so well-educated people of color and their less racist white allies. The racists involved in the Bungalows War mess continue to underestimate my intelligence while I continue to outwit them. They cling to their racist theory that black women, especially older ones born in the Jim Crow South, are stupid and so can be intimidated and played by their lawyer jargon.
Most of the racists I encounter on Twitter and Facebook aren’t as well-educated as the foolish Kriger lawyer, so I try to be more patient and less brutal in my witty takedowns of them. Intellectual bullies can be as obnoxious as physical or politically/economically powerful ones. But when social media bigots call me ignorant, I weaponize their grammar/editing errors and blow them up. One troll responded to my comment about Trump’s knowing less about “the system” than a fifth grader (this was on a Brian Williams video site, so any conservatives commenting were trolling) with “your some kind of ignorant.” I shot back, “I’m the kind of ignorant that knows the difference between “your” and “you’re.’” A troll commenting on my response to a Jim Acosta tweet asked me if I was a “freaking teacher” after I called him out for several errors. I responded, “I’m a freaking retired English teacher.” My response to the Acosta tweet about not insulting clowns activated several trolls, but most of them dropped out after one or two verbal punches from me. They realized that they were punching above their weight. But two hung around for days, debating me on such issues as immigration, taxes, Barack Obama’s competence, real religion and birth place, and Joe Biden’s “alleged” dementia. They were responding to my comment that comparing Trump to clowns, pigs, and toddlers was insulting to all of them, so we should call him an alien since he calls people coming across our southern border “illegal aliens.” I had fun asking if Ivana and Melania Trump were “legal aliens.”
While most of what is being said and done during this anti-democracy, white supremacy period is absurd, it’s not always amusing. There is nothing funny about a rich white man who didn’t have one grandparent born in America and four of whose five children have foreign-born mothers being allowed to appoint himself Captain America with the right to determine who is and who is not a “real” American and who should and who should not go back to their ancestors’ country. And there’s certainly nothing funny about a born-rich white man whose mother is from Scotland and whose father’s first language was German (according to niece Mary) winning the Republican nomination and the electoral college because he said that his half-black predecessor, whose white maternal relatives (the people who raised him) were from Kansas, was really born in Kenya and because he promised to build a wall to keep the brown “rapists and drug dealers” that Mexico was “sending us” from coming to America.
There’s also nothing funny about the absurd racist claim that the mostly peaceful BLM protesters, who were more likely to be victims of rioting police officers than violent rioters, were terrorists and anarchists while the real terrorists and anarchists, the insurrectionists who tried to stage a coup on 1/6 and were hunting Mike Pence to hang him and Nancy Pelosi to shoot her in the head, are being compared to tourists. I laughed at Officer Hodges’ comment during the first 1/6 hearing that if that’s how American tourists act no wonder people in other countries don’t like them, but calling black people anarchists and terrorists endangers our lives while racist white people can beat and attack hundreds of cops, leaving more than 140 injured, some of them severely/permanently and still portray the one person killed by a cop defending the Capitol as a martyr because she’s a white woman. It’s absurd that the cops were being beaten with BlueLivesMatter flags, but it’s not funny. It’s absurd that the anchors on Fox, who kept replaying the most violent scenes during the 93% peaceful protests last summer, calling for law and order and defending the cops beating, pepper spraying, and shooting protesters and journalists with rubber bullets, were actually ridiculing those heroic cops who saved our democracy and the lives of Democratic and Republican politicians as well as staff, janitors, and other people doing their jobs that day, but it’s not funny. Laura Ingraham, possibly the worst blonde not named Ivanka, actually gave out acting awards to those four police officers (two of them white) who were describing their traumatic experiences. I gave her (on Twitter) the worst performance by a Karen award and suggested she compete on “Dancing with the Stars” since she probably can dance better than her colleague Tucker Carlson, the worst dancer to ever appear on that show.
Most of the events of this past week were not funny, but the appearance of the goofy G-Squad of Goons—Gaetz, Greene, and Gohmert—at the Washington jail so they could inspect the conditions of the cells where the Terrorists/Traitors, Racists, Anarchists, Seditionists, and Hoodlums (TRASH) were being housed did tickle my funny bone. I suggested the goons might actually be checking out the accommodations because they knew they would be there soon. As I was comfort-reading a fun book about the so-called “real housewives” (many of whom aren’t married), I imagined a confrontation between three women who have been paid to be reality tv stars and the G-Squad, who should be paid for their absurd made-for-television antics, but not for badly representing their constituents. Since Greene is from Georgia, it would be appropriate for three of the more rambunctious Atlanta Housewives to confront them at the jail. I would cast lawyer/mortician Phaedra, big mouth bully NeNe, and shady beauty queen Kenya to serve as the welcoming committee the next time the goofy goons appear outside the jail. If he can reproduce his eighties voice, McEnroe can serve as narrator of that potentially hilarious confrontation.
I wish the election of an insane, white supremacist, reality tv host “alien” was a joke. And I wish the birther nonsense and the voter suppression activities were jokes. But they’re not, so the media, as well as American citizens and voters, must take the threat to our democracy seriously. The white supremacists are serious, so we must battle them seriously. But we can laugh while we’re battling. Right, McEnroe?
