GW And The Not So Poor Proud Boy: Lazy, Trashy Americans
Now that the most insane, incompetent, and corrupt President in American history is out of the White House and off Twitter (but occasionally still dominating the news), the second worst President in my lifetime is on my nerves again. First GW claimed (I hope he’s lying and actually did vote like the patriot he claims to be) that he wrote in girlfriend Condi’s name instead of voting for the only viable candidate who could save American democracy from the maniac that white folks, including too many rich ones, made our electoral college President in 2016. Then he and his paintings of immigrants were featured in PEOPLE magazine, where he displayed his painting of the Latina housekeeper who started working for his family when he was 13 and continued to work for them until she was 95 (by that time, his parents had died). His beloved nanny/maid was still working at 95, and he’s not ashamed? The same week that despicable fact was revealed I read an LA Times story about one of the leaders of the white supremacist group Proud Boys. The story was actually more about his father’s restaurant in the Seattle, Washington, area and how his son’s activities had hurt the business. The son often worked for his father, which is why he had time to fly around the country promoting hatred and to go to Washington D.C. to try to hang Mike Pence, shoot Nancy Pelosi, and steal an election for a racist, insane wannabe autocrat. I haven’t yet used that story in my social media battles with conservatives who think that the lazy folks are the working-class people (mostly people of color) who some in the media are claiming won’t work now because they’re “living so large” on the temporarily expanded unemployment benefits (which at least in California are taxed, unlike rich folks’ assets). I haven’t yet used GW and the not so poor Proud Boy in my social media battles because my stories of the lazy, somewhat wealthy white women of Highland Park, Illinois, whom my mother and I worked for in the early sixties always win the word war over who the lazy Americans really are.
Not all rich white folks are lazy, trashy (well, the Highland Park women were classier than Trump, GW, and the TRASH who stormed the Capitol on 1/6), and racist (yes, GW loves black women, but white supremacist Strom Thurmond had a child with his mother’s sixteen-year-old black maid; white men and some white women have always loved dark bodies). When the media was covering how despicably Trump treated the people of color who worked for him, I told the story of one of the friends my mother made when they were both working as live-in maids in Highland Park and attending church in Evanston. Her white folks (as we called them) bought her a house in her home state Tennessee when she was in her late sixties or early seventies and paid for her retirement. I don’t care if the 95-year-old Latina (she died at 97) was just baking for the Bushes (Jenna said in the PEOPLE story that her grandmother, who never worked or finished college, couldn’t bake) when she was in her seventies, eighties, and nineties. She should not have been working for those lazy, racist, rich, white jerks. They should be ashamed that they didn’t make sure she had a comfortable place to stay during her senior years. If she didn’t want to leave them, they should have made a place for her in their homes and let her be served by the new, preferably young and white, “help.” It’s very revealing that GW Bush (and the PEOPLE journalist who interviewed him) saw the story of a brown woman working as a maid and cook for a white family until she was 95 as a warm portrait of what immigrants have contributed to America. As my maternal grandmother used to say, “Lord, have mercy on these white folks!”
Often in my class and race social media debates I deploy a weapon that lyricist for the black national anthem and first NAACP Secretary James Weldon Johnson used so effectively in his classic 1912 novel AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN. Instead of writing the typical for his era tragic mulatto tale of suffering and usually death for the white enough to pass protagonist, Johnson wrote a comic mulatto tale. While the ex-colored man is handsome, smart, and talented (he played ragtime music), he’s a coward who runs at the first sign of trouble. But as soon as he passes for white and moves north, he becomes a successful businessman, marries a beautiful white woman (although she dies after giving birth to two children), and lives comfortably ever after. Following Johnson’s lead, instead of discussing the difficulties that my family members and I have faced as black people, I speculate about what would have happened if George W. Bush and Donald Trump had been working or middle-class black men. Alcoholic underachiever Bush wouldn’t have been hired to be a janitor in the White House because of his drunk driving record, and the insane Trump would be a homeless man hanging out in Central Park claiming he was the President of the United States. The PEOPLE magazine story made me so angry because it reminded me of what some fool said in 2004, explaining his vote for the then most incompetent President in my lifetime. The fool said he voted for Bush so he could clean up the messes he had made. Tell that to the family members of the people lost during Katrina! Tell that to the family members of the veterans lost and to the wounded veterans (Bush painted pictures of them and donated the money to charities supporting them, so he’s not only more competent and sane but also more compassionate and capable of feeling guilt than the much more despicable Trump) in Bush’s never-ending war. At the time I heard that comment, I made the obvious point that Bush had no experience cleaning up his own messes. His maids cleaned up his messes when he was a child, and his father and his family’s powerful friends cleaned up his messes when he became an adult. It’s not a coincidence that the two worst Presidents in my lifetime were also the two who lost the popular vote and were still able to enter the White House and appoint conservative judges who don’t represent our country. Those two rich white men never had to take responsibility for the messes they made. They could lose elections, go bankrupt, start wars they couldn’t finish, and still fail upward. I was so angry about the poor brown woman working for rich white folks until she was 95 that I couldn’t enjoy the fact that the charmingly self-deprecating (he’s still a saint compared to Trump) Bush reported that the brown immigrant nanny/maid called him “pig” because he was (get ready) so MESSY! Cute! But even half-black Obama couldn’t clean up all the messes that rich, white pig left after eight years in the White House.
Of course, not all born-rich Presidents were as messy as Trump and Bush. FDR was before my time, but I was a child during the Kennedy years and have read more books about that family than I have about any of the American writers (even Morrison and Faulkner) that I taught for so many years. Their lives were very messy, and any woman who rides in a moving vehicle with a Kennedy male is risking death or severe injury, but they believe in the service part of “public service.” Special Olympics, Best Buddies, and other charitable organizations created by members of the family are not slick money-making schemes; the programs they support help disabled people. Still the Kennedys have the same sense of entitlement that the Bushes have. Bobby Kennedy’s grandson challenged a popular incumbent Massachusetts Senator because he thought a Kennedy wouldn’t lose in that state. Uh, wrong. A Kennedy did lose in the state where JFK, Ted, and the loser’s father had all won. I partly blame GW’s smarter, more competent younger brother Jeb as well as 2016 People’s President Hillary Clinton for what happened that year. After the mess dynasty candidate GW left, Americans were so fearful of another dynasty President and so against the idea of another Clinton-Bush campaign (even Mama Barbara pointed out that there were more than two families in America before she endorsed her son) that they voted for a seventy-year-old reality television star/con man, and many on the left voted for an even older and angrier socialist.
The rich TRASH who stormed the Capitol on 1/6/21 were also entitled jerks who believed that only they should choose the President. They were willing to kill people and destroy our democracy to get their way. Then, when they were imprisoned, they complained about the accommodations. And one woman didn’t want to be arrested because she was planning a vacation in Mexico. Tell it to the civil rights activists of the fifties and sixties. They were beaten and sent to jail for marching peacefully for the right to vote, eat in restaurants, stay in hotels, and live wherever they could afford to live. Reverend Al Sharpton claimed that he spent two months in jail after he had become a famous public figure. But TRASH, who left feces and urine as well as broken windows and papers strewn all over offices and Congressional chambers in the Capitol, thought they were too good, too “all-American” (aka white), to spend time in jail. And there are people in Congress who are promoting that big lie, portraying TRASH as patriots who love America or typical tourists enjoying looking at the statues.
I said in an earlier post (8/14/19) that bigots love the black people living in their heads, the lazy welfare and food stamp recipients who reside in rat-infested apartments in the inner cities of Baltimore, Chicago, and New York. They hate the middle-class and upper-class black folks who have spacious homes in the suburbs and are smarter and as rich as they are. Fox’s Tucker Carlson illustrated that point when he attacked Harvard graduate and MSNBC anchor Joy Reid not long after he talked about parents beating their children in Wal Mart. But too many Americans also love the rich white men living in their heads. They’re the ones too many of us believe should run the country because they’re successful and so will make America and Americans successful winners. In fact, born-rich white men who never had to work to achieve anything are often losers, and if we keep letting them occupy the White House (even when they lose the popular vote), America will continue to lose lives in wars and natural disasters, lose prestige around the world, and eventually we will lose our democracy. Fortunately, three-time winner of the popular vote (twice as Vice President and once as President, always with a mixed race running mate) Joe Biden was not born rich, and neither was his Vice President Kamala Harris. Let’s hope they can clean up most of the many messes left by trashy, lazy, crazy, born-rich, two-time loser of the popular vote, and twice impeached Donald J. Trump.
Not all rich white folks are lazy, trashy (well, the Highland Park women were classier than Trump, GW, and the TRASH who stormed the Capitol on 1/6), and racist (yes, GW loves black women, but white supremacist Strom Thurmond had a child with his mother’s sixteen-year-old black maid; white men and some white women have always loved dark bodies). When the media was covering how despicably Trump treated the people of color who worked for him, I told the story of one of the friends my mother made when they were both working as live-in maids in Highland Park and attending church in Evanston. Her white folks (as we called them) bought her a house in her home state Tennessee when she was in her late sixties or early seventies and paid for her retirement. I don’t care if the 95-year-old Latina (she died at 97) was just baking for the Bushes (Jenna said in the PEOPLE story that her grandmother, who never worked or finished college, couldn’t bake) when she was in her seventies, eighties, and nineties. She should not have been working for those lazy, racist, rich, white jerks. They should be ashamed that they didn’t make sure she had a comfortable place to stay during her senior years. If she didn’t want to leave them, they should have made a place for her in their homes and let her be served by the new, preferably young and white, “help.” It’s very revealing that GW Bush (and the PEOPLE journalist who interviewed him) saw the story of a brown woman working as a maid and cook for a white family until she was 95 as a warm portrait of what immigrants have contributed to America. As my maternal grandmother used to say, “Lord, have mercy on these white folks!”
Often in my class and race social media debates I deploy a weapon that lyricist for the black national anthem and first NAACP Secretary James Weldon Johnson used so effectively in his classic 1912 novel AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN. Instead of writing the typical for his era tragic mulatto tale of suffering and usually death for the white enough to pass protagonist, Johnson wrote a comic mulatto tale. While the ex-colored man is handsome, smart, and talented (he played ragtime music), he’s a coward who runs at the first sign of trouble. But as soon as he passes for white and moves north, he becomes a successful businessman, marries a beautiful white woman (although she dies after giving birth to two children), and lives comfortably ever after. Following Johnson’s lead, instead of discussing the difficulties that my family members and I have faced as black people, I speculate about what would have happened if George W. Bush and Donald Trump had been working or middle-class black men. Alcoholic underachiever Bush wouldn’t have been hired to be a janitor in the White House because of his drunk driving record, and the insane Trump would be a homeless man hanging out in Central Park claiming he was the President of the United States. The PEOPLE magazine story made me so angry because it reminded me of what some fool said in 2004, explaining his vote for the then most incompetent President in my lifetime. The fool said he voted for Bush so he could clean up the messes he had made. Tell that to the family members of the people lost during Katrina! Tell that to the family members of the veterans lost and to the wounded veterans (Bush painted pictures of them and donated the money to charities supporting them, so he’s not only more competent and sane but also more compassionate and capable of feeling guilt than the much more despicable Trump) in Bush’s never-ending war. At the time I heard that comment, I made the obvious point that Bush had no experience cleaning up his own messes. His maids cleaned up his messes when he was a child, and his father and his family’s powerful friends cleaned up his messes when he became an adult. It’s not a coincidence that the two worst Presidents in my lifetime were also the two who lost the popular vote and were still able to enter the White House and appoint conservative judges who don’t represent our country. Those two rich white men never had to take responsibility for the messes they made. They could lose elections, go bankrupt, start wars they couldn’t finish, and still fail upward. I was so angry about the poor brown woman working for rich white folks until she was 95 that I couldn’t enjoy the fact that the charmingly self-deprecating (he’s still a saint compared to Trump) Bush reported that the brown immigrant nanny/maid called him “pig” because he was (get ready) so MESSY! Cute! But even half-black Obama couldn’t clean up all the messes that rich, white pig left after eight years in the White House.
Of course, not all born-rich Presidents were as messy as Trump and Bush. FDR was before my time, but I was a child during the Kennedy years and have read more books about that family than I have about any of the American writers (even Morrison and Faulkner) that I taught for so many years. Their lives were very messy, and any woman who rides in a moving vehicle with a Kennedy male is risking death or severe injury, but they believe in the service part of “public service.” Special Olympics, Best Buddies, and other charitable organizations created by members of the family are not slick money-making schemes; the programs they support help disabled people. Still the Kennedys have the same sense of entitlement that the Bushes have. Bobby Kennedy’s grandson challenged a popular incumbent Massachusetts Senator because he thought a Kennedy wouldn’t lose in that state. Uh, wrong. A Kennedy did lose in the state where JFK, Ted, and the loser’s father had all won. I partly blame GW’s smarter, more competent younger brother Jeb as well as 2016 People’s President Hillary Clinton for what happened that year. After the mess dynasty candidate GW left, Americans were so fearful of another dynasty President and so against the idea of another Clinton-Bush campaign (even Mama Barbara pointed out that there were more than two families in America before she endorsed her son) that they voted for a seventy-year-old reality television star/con man, and many on the left voted for an even older and angrier socialist.
The rich TRASH who stormed the Capitol on 1/6/21 were also entitled jerks who believed that only they should choose the President. They were willing to kill people and destroy our democracy to get their way. Then, when they were imprisoned, they complained about the accommodations. And one woman didn’t want to be arrested because she was planning a vacation in Mexico. Tell it to the civil rights activists of the fifties and sixties. They were beaten and sent to jail for marching peacefully for the right to vote, eat in restaurants, stay in hotels, and live wherever they could afford to live. Reverend Al Sharpton claimed that he spent two months in jail after he had become a famous public figure. But TRASH, who left feces and urine as well as broken windows and papers strewn all over offices and Congressional chambers in the Capitol, thought they were too good, too “all-American” (aka white), to spend time in jail. And there are people in Congress who are promoting that big lie, portraying TRASH as patriots who love America or typical tourists enjoying looking at the statues.
I said in an earlier post (8/14/19) that bigots love the black people living in their heads, the lazy welfare and food stamp recipients who reside in rat-infested apartments in the inner cities of Baltimore, Chicago, and New York. They hate the middle-class and upper-class black folks who have spacious homes in the suburbs and are smarter and as rich as they are. Fox’s Tucker Carlson illustrated that point when he attacked Harvard graduate and MSNBC anchor Joy Reid not long after he talked about parents beating their children in Wal Mart. But too many Americans also love the rich white men living in their heads. They’re the ones too many of us believe should run the country because they’re successful and so will make America and Americans successful winners. In fact, born-rich white men who never had to work to achieve anything are often losers, and if we keep letting them occupy the White House (even when they lose the popular vote), America will continue to lose lives in wars and natural disasters, lose prestige around the world, and eventually we will lose our democracy. Fortunately, three-time winner of the popular vote (twice as Vice President and once as President, always with a mixed race running mate) Joe Biden was not born rich, and neither was his Vice President Kamala Harris. Let’s hope they can clean up most of the many messes left by trashy, lazy, crazy, born-rich, two-time loser of the popular vote, and twice impeached Donald J. Trump.
No comments have been added yet.
