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The Pickford Word

Dear Reader:  Some of our blogs may contain offensive language-- unlike so many blogs, wherein it is the quality of writing which offends the sensibilities.

THE EMPEROR’S OLD CLOTHES

4/1/2017

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By the Pickford Studios Crew

                                                            
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Pickford Studios is proud to announce that as a result of turning our staff into a 'round the clock, 24 hour crew, along with a special deal we have cut with Reuters and the A.P., we now have FIRST ACCESS to all breaking news stories coming across the wire.  Because of our astonishing site stats in our 18 month old blog, and our formation of a groundbreaking new journalism juggernaut--B.J.T.C.  (Better Journalism Through Caffeine), we will now be able to offer more than just blogging and punditry ...we will actually be bringing you breaking news the very nanosecond that it happens!



BREAKING NEWS:


TRUMP COMES UP WITH GENIUS IDEA TO WIPE OUT NATION'S 587 BILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT.

Trump has United States declare Bankruptcy!   

"This is my seventh bankruptcy, people, and everybody knows that Seven is a lucky number.  And who would know lucky numbers better than me, a hyuge casino owner."


UPDATE:  In a bizarre turn of events, involving some incredibly bad luck for President Trump, the bankruptcy proceedings were overseen by a judge whom Trump had dealt with before.   The Honorable A'isha Intizara Maria Hernandez--who is of Muslim/Latino extraction, and who is married to the famous black PGA champion Lyon Forrest--was the woman on the bench who would be deciding The President's fate.  Judge Hernandez's parents are Ms. Fatima Fez, who is the former Deputy Chairman for Management and Budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, and Mr. David Hernandez, who is the Executive Director of Corporate Engagement for Meals on Wheels America.






Ironically, Trump’s former dealings with this judge involved a lawsuit that actually originated right here out of Pickford Studios.  When Trump was still a private (well, depends on how you define “private”) citizen, he attempted to claim patent and trademark rights for “Mexifornia: The Board Game” which was actually created by The Pickford Word’s own Mickey McClain.  (See moviesforyourmind.net, under HOME, under AUTHORS for Mickey’s bio.)  Similar in appearance to “Monopoly”, “Mexifornia: The Board Game” consists of a colorful board , two stacks of cards, elaborate rules of play, and some really cool game pieces.  The game lets players determine whether immigrants are a blight or a boon, whether white Americans are bigots exploiting the workers, or just good old patriots wishing to enforce the rules of law and keep our borders safe.  It was Trump’s intention to claim ownership and turn the game into a new reality show, but the litigation drags on, leaving the outcome in limbo.   Mr. McClain also claims that Trump’s new theme park (TrumpLand!) has stolen Mickey’s travelling road show idea for the Gigantic Bobblehead Doll & Pez Dispenser Competition.  (In a separate lawsuit, Mickey McClain is being sued by the Pez Candy Company.  Mr. McClain is currently attempting to crowdfund his defense.)

In what some have criticized as an act of legislating from the bench, Judge Hernandez refused President Trump’s request for a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy filing on behalf of the United States of America, and instead Hernandez declared that Trump would have to declare both Chapter 11 and Chapter 7, given that just last week, Trump snuck an executive order under the radar, lost in the kerfuffle about Nunes and Flynn, as well as the two new executive orders regarding trade.  The Judge was referring to Executive Order 13782.5, in which Trump declared that the title of "President of the United States of America” be amended to read "President-Kingish Emperorus Maximus Trump."   Hernandez declared the executive order to be yet a further power grab from the most powerful man in the world, and that in attempting to blend his personal and professional identities, Trump had opened himself up to the unprecedented joining of the Chapters 7 and 11 bankruptcies.

As such, the draconian rules regarding the seizure of personal assets by the court and by creditors immediately applied to Donald Trump.

It was noted that Trump flipped Hernandez The Bird upon hearing this.

The White House, Mar-a-Lago, and Trump Towers have all been taken from The Donald, with the Judge declaring that Trump shall serve out the remainder of his presidency in the Mar-a-Lago groundskeeper hut.

Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood have both offered up their properties as the potential "next" White House, for “46”, Redford offering up his breathtaking Apsen A Frame, while Dirty Harry can see the President living in his Malibu digs.

Because Trump's wardrobe goes wildly over the limit of allowable assets, the Judge allowed him to select three suits, and three ties.  Trump selected three black suits and three red ties.

The Judge also allowed Donald Trump to keep some tools and a tool box that had been handed down to him by his grandfather, stating that "Trump could use them to learn what it meant to really do some actual work."   Anderson Cooper, reporting from inside the courthouse, stated that "Trump picked up, each in turn, a hammer, a screwdriver, a pliers, studying them with simian-like befuddlement reminiscent of the infamous black monolith scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, apparently having no idea what they were for”.

Because President Trump "mistakenly" declared his wife "an asset", Judge Hernandez declared them "instantaneously divorced" with one swift THWACK of her gavel.   Melania was last seen skipping gleefully down the courthouse steps with her son Barron. She then got into an idling Uber vehicle, driven by a one Travis Kalanick.   The three quickly sped away, and eyewitnesses reported seeing Melania cackling wildly inside the vehicle.

Trump was also ordered to surrender his entire fleet of vehicles, and was given a choice of just three to pick from, for his personal and Presidential use:  

1.  A Corbin Sparrow he received as a gift from the factory workers when he visited Myers Motors in Tallmadge, Ohio, for a big Trump Rally.  In a separate lawsuit, Trump is still dealing with the fallout from accepting such a large (well, relatively speaking) gift while acting in his role as President of the United States.  Trump's lawyers have countered that the President was actually campaigning for 2020 during the rally, and as such, was functioning as a candidate, not The President, and as such had a right to accept said Sparrow.  

2.  His personal limousine.  But there is a hitch:  the Judge declared that if Trump was to select this as the single personal vehicle that he is allowed to keep after bankruptcy, it is under the condition that he actually act as chauffeur, learning what it is like to make an honest living.  

3.  At this point, the Pickford Crew had trouble with their fax machine, and the listing for the third vehicle from which Trump had to choose came across the wires as merely the cryptic words........”Go F art!"

Back at the courthouse, the bankruptcy proceedings were over in a record breaking seventeen minutes, and Trump left with a big smile on his face, declaring to reporters that it had all gone exactly as he had planned, and that he had "WON BIGLY!"    He then got into his golf cart, and rode away, his combover riding the wind, creating its own little border wall between his big brain, and the vastness of our universe.
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An Open Letter to Donald Trump - No. 2

2/25/2017

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By Meg Langford​

Hey.  Donald.    Or should we say, "Dear Mr. President".

Every day, thousands of journalists go out into the world to uncover the real story--not, the "Fake News"

And every year, dozens of reporters from across the globe are slaughtered for merely doing their jobs:  for finding the facts.  For seeking out the truth.  

Here for you we have gathered a few pictures, since in-depth analysis does not seem to be your strong suit, Mr. President.  So pictures.  For you.

This is what happens to journalists when their tyrannical and dictatorial leaders do not want the unflattering facts to come out.

And below, see a gallery of American journalists who were cut down in the prime of life--murdered, just for doing their jobs.

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Mr. President, when you accuse people who publish stories you do not like, or that are unflattering to you, of printing "FAKE NEWS", you insult the living members of the Fourth Estate, who are risking their lives in the name of democracy.  And more importantly, you insult the dead, who have made the ultimate sacrifice in their search for the truth.

Donald, you finally have something that makes you just like ISIS:  you both hate journalists.

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Daniel Pearlman, shown from left with his new bride Mariane, and in captivity before his beheading.
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STEALING THUNDER, Part One

12/24/2016

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No, Seriously

​        By Meg Langford                            
 
                
I know how to shame the new President, come inauguration day.  I know the entity that is capable of pulling it off.

And no, it is not Beyoncé, Kanye, or Aretha Franklin.  It is not Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin.  It is not Anderson Cooper or John Oliver or Megyn Kelley or even Ted Nugent, who is as of this writing apparently the only entertainer who will consider sharing a stage with Drumpf.

It is the one entity that has been able to steal the show since moving pictures were invented.  (I myself have an eternal crush on Shirley Temple).

Kids.  I am talking about the kids of America. 

Not only is the modest proposal offered forth in the blog that follows quite serious…I will go so far as to say that I am being as serious as I have ever been.

What we need, people, is a Million Kid March against Donald Trump.

And it needs to happen on Inauguration Day.  January Twentieth.   Get out the long underwear and the ear muffs and the kiddie trapper hats and the idiot mittens with the strings and clips; we are about to create the youngest generation of hippies in history.  Winter hippies.

Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking, and you are right.  At first, the logistics seemed impossible to me, too.  My father was actually a logistical engineer in the Air Force, and quite a fine one, with a few textbooks and some ranks and clearance to his name, so I think about things in logistical terms quite a lot.  When the crew here at Pickford Studios first batted the idea around, it seemed like a logistical nightmare.  A million kids?  On the mall?  And of course, that would really mean more like two or three or four million people, since of course those kids would be accompanied by parents.  Also seems like a pedophile’s wet dream, if all the proper security is not in place.

But dig it:

We don’t need a million kids on the mall.  (We can build up to that, culminating in a Million Kid March on the actual Washington Mall, say, on July 4th, 2020.  Or Election Day, 2020.  Stay tuned.)

But no, why not just make it a Million Kid March in thousands of communities across this great nation?  That way, it is easily arranged in tiny towns and hamlets across America, as easily as if folks were planning a bake sale or a pep rally.  The total numbers will be easy to tally.  Locals can do head counts, it will all be documented on the local evening news, and at the end of the day, we can see just how many kids turn out to turn their futures around.

The idea is this:  kids in each town or city start at a logical Point A, like their school, and march to a logical Point B, like some meaningful monument or civic building nearby.  And they bring with them posters.  Placards.  Recited evidence, and solid reasons that they are now and eternally against the presidency of Donald Trump.   But more on that in Part Two of our blog.

Let’s go back to the idea of a Million Kid March.

And by the way, since I am my usual logorrheic self in this blog, let me cut to the basics, for those of you in a hurry.  It would go something like this:
  1.  Fire of the gist of this blog to everyone on your email tree, phone tree, Facebook group, etcetera.
  2. Coordinate with other interested parents at the school.
  3. Teach your children the reality of their country’s future, and of the planet’s environment, under a Trump presidency.
  4. Consider T-shirts; they create a unifying presence.  Organizing kids is a bit like herding cats; kids are not known for presenting a unified front.
  5. March on January 20th.

There.  Eazy Peasy, right?  Admit it; your last fundraiser took more out of you.

And no, you don’t have to register, get permission, coordinate with other marches, fill out an application, follow a format, give me your email address, or pay a fee.
 
                                                                                 *****
 
I remember distinctly the conversation that took place as the Pickford Studios crew was driving home from Orlando, Florida, from the site of the Pulse shooting.  It was about six months ago. We were talking about Trump’s momentum in the presidential campaign, and sardonically concluded that, as angry as we were, the bitter truth was that it ultimately wouldn’t impact us all that much.  We are all older people; our lives have largely been lived and our plans for the future are relatively intact.  There isn’t much Trump can do to us.  But there is a great deal that Trump can do to destroy the future of this country.  And of the world.

We may not be able to do anything about the next four years.  But it is never too early to start planning on victory in 2020.  To plot the demise of the Donald.

The part about stealing Trump’s thunder a month from now is pretty delicious too, especially given that he is a Narcissistic Megalomaniac, if ever there was one.  (Watch for my upcoming blog about Trump as Psychopath.)  And trust me, kids are the secret. 

Kids are the Secret Weapon, and the proof is in history.  They can get the public’s attention and steal everybody’s thunder when nobody else can:

You think Rosa Parks was so great?  Well, yes, she was.  But she often overshadows the child who was her inspiration, a fifteen-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin who took the same heroic stand nine months earlier, when she refused to give up her seat to a white person.  This child was brutalized by the local cops who, among other things, inexplicably kept calling her a “whore” as they kicked her, then dragged her to the local jail, fingerprinted her, and booked her, all the while jokingly trying to guess her bra size.  But she won out in the end; it was her heroism that impelled Rosa and Martin Luther King and a group of other progressives to plan not only the Parks incident, but the crippling bus boycott, all of which changed American history and moved us that much closer to equality.
Claudette Colvin changed the course of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.  And she was a mere child when she did so.

In November of 1982, when it seemed that the Cold War would never thaw, it took a letter from ten year old Samantha Smith, addressed to a man named Yuri Andropov to start melting the ice.  Andropov had just succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union, while far away in the great state of Maine, Samantha Smith was worried about the shadow of nuclear war.  So she did the logical, polite thing.  She wrote a letter to the new Russian leader expressing her concerns.  Here is the letter Samantha wrote to Yuri Andropov:
 
Dear Mr. Andropov,
 
My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.
 
Sincerely,
 
Samantha Smith
 
Here is Andropov’s reply:

Dear Samantha,

 
I received your letter, which is like many others that have reached me recently from your country and from other countries around the world.
It seems to me – I can tell by your letter – that you are a courageous and honest girl, resembling Becky, the friend of Tom Sawyer in the famous book of your compatriot Mark Twain. This book is well known and loved in our country by all boys and girls.
 
You write that you are anxious about whether there will be a nuclear war between our two countries. And you ask are we doing anything so that war will not break out.
Your question is the most important of those that every thinking man can pose. I will reply to you seriously and honestly.
 
Yes, Samantha, we in the Soviet Union are trying to do everything so that there will not be war on Earth. This is what every Soviet man wants. This is what the great founder of our state, Vladimir Lenin, taught us.
 
Soviet people well know what a terrible thing war is. Forty-two years ago, Nazi Germany, which strove for supremacy over the whole world, attacked our country, burned and destroyed many thousands of our towns and villages, killed millions of Soviet men, women and children.
 
In that war, which ended with our victory, we were in alliance with the United States: together we fought for the liberation of many people from the Nazi invaders. I hope that you know about this from your history lessons in school. And today we want very much to live in peace, to trade and cooperate with all our neighbors on this earth — with those far away and those nearby. And certainly with such a great country as the United States of America.
 
In America and in our country there are nuclear weapons — terrible weapons that can kill millions of people in an instant. But we do not want them to be ever used. That's precisely why the Soviet Union solemnly declared throughout the entire world that never — never — will it use nuclear weapons first against any country. In general we propose to discontinue further production of them and to proceed to the abolition of all the stockpiles on Earth.
 
It seems to me that this is a sufficient answer to your second question: 'Why do you want to wage war against the whole world or at least the United States?' We want nothing of the kind. No one in our country–neither workers, peasants, writers nor doctors, neither grown-ups nor children, nor members of the government–want either a big or 'little' war.
 
We want peace — there is something that we are occupied with: growing wheat, building and inventing, writing books and flying into space. We want peace for ourselves and for all peoples of the planet. For our children and for you, Samantha.
 
I invite you, if your parents will let you, to come to our country, the best time being this summer. You will find out about our country, meet with your contemporaries, visit an international children's camp – Artek – on the sea. And see for yourself: in the Soviet Union, everyone is for peace and friendship among peoples.
 
Thank you for your letter. I wish you all the best in your young life.
 
Y. Andropov
 
Forgive me, but I find it hard to imagine Vladimir Putin penning such a letter.  And ever sadder still, even as I write this (December 22nd, 2016), in a horrifically bizarre twist of timing and fate, Trump has just tweeted: “the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.”

Oh My God.  Our new president has just basically pledged that he will ratchet up the arms race.  And poke a very large and terrifying sleeping bear.

But not even Trump can take away Samantha Smith’s legacy.  For a brief and shining moment, Samantha Smith became an international celebrity for her peaceful overtures towards Russia, and she shamed the grown-ups into re-examining their prejudices. 

The power of pleading children.

Millions of people purchase gorgeous carpets produced from exotic locales in the Middle East, but at what cost?   Born in 1983, Iqbal Masih was just one example of enslaved armies of child laborers who even today live a hellish childhood, just so we can have something pretty under our feet.   Born in 1983 in Punjab, Pakistan, he was sold into child labor by his parents, their way of paying back a loan worth six American dollars.  At the tender age of four, Iqbal was forced to rise before dawn, walk down dark and treacherous country roads, and then work for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, while tightly bound by chains.  He escaped, was tortured, escaped again, and at the age of twelve became an international spokesperson against child slavery.

The charisma of kids.

When the U.S.S. Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese torpedo at the end of World War II, and every survivor on that ship believed that their beloved Captain McVay was wrongly court  martialed because the Navy desperately needed a scapegoat to save face in front of an outraged nation, those hundreds of survivors were not able to change the ruling of the court, and McVay’s reputation was ruined.  Nor were the journalists and authors who took up the cause able to change the court’s mind.  Nor were the politicians who campaigned to get the unjust court martial reversed.  Nope, it wasn’t until an upstart director named Steven Spielberg made a terrifying movie called “Jaws” which was then seen by a twelve year old kid named Hunter Scott (like the hero from a novel, that name, yeah?) did the momentum start to swing the other way.  Hunter Scott was mesmerized by the haunting scene in which Quint describes being a sailor on the doomed Indianapolis.  When Hunter asked his father if it was all true, his father gave the stock good dad answer:  “Look it up.”  Later, thanks to a history project created by the passionate and intrepid ‘tween, history itself was finally rewritten.  And Captain McVay was vindicated.  Talk about the power of kids: just picture Hunter Scott testifying before the Congress of the United States.  In 2000, Congress then passed a resolution that McVay's record should reflect that "he is exonerated for the loss of the USS Indianapolis." President Clinton also signed the resolution. In July 2001, Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England ordered McVay's official Navy record purged of all wrongdoing.
 
Kids.
 
And we hardly even need to repeat the stories of how Anne Frank and Malala Yousafzai served as voices for millions who could not get their message out to the world.

And just to repeat what I have iterated in previous blogs:  I am not talking about Democrats versus Republicans, or even liberals versus conservatives.  I believe in a strong military, and you cannot have lived seventeen years in California, nor have witnessed the madness in Europe, without believing in some sane, sound plan for curbed immigration.  No, I am talking about those moments when Trump basically manifested sheer psychopathy:  being cavalier about dropping nuclear weapons, and his willingness to pull out of the Paris Climate Treaty, and to gut the EPA, and to conduct a witch hunt for those who would fight the deadly consequences of climate change. It is quite one thing to think you know more than your neighbor, or some politician.  It is quite another thing to think you know more than the majority of scientists on the planet.

Let’s face it.  It is not the grown-ups who should be terrified of Trump.  (Although if you are an adult Latino, Muslim, Jew, black, or female, you should certainly be mightily offended by him and his potty mouth.) 

No, it is the children of America who should be truly terrified. 

Factoid:  there are about 75 million human beings in the United States who classify as “kids”, i.e., under eighteen. 

That means that for the “Million Kid March” to work, only one out of every 75 kids would have to get off of their Fruit Roll Up butts on January 20th and march, carrying signs and powerful visuals, from their school to the nearest monument of meaning in their tiny town, to make a complete idiot of Trump, as he is being sworn in.  To steal his thunder.  That sounds doable, yes? 

And given that those above mentioned 75 kids have approximately 30 parents (the average couple having roughly 2.5 kids), that means that only about one pair of every 30 parents need to get off their Snackwell asses to march with their kids for the future of the world.   Again, I maintain that that sounds eminently “doable”.  After all, there are a great many adults who are going to be very, very angry on January 20th.   And some of them are even Republicans.
 
 
      HOW TO ACTUALLY GET A MILLION KIDS.
 
I will grant you, getting a million kids for a Million Kid March may seem like a bit of a stretch for this first event—our spoiling of Trump’s inaugural—but it could be done.  Let’s break down the math. 

There are fifty states in the union; divide one million by fifty states and that means we would need 20,000 kids marching in each state.  That seems alternately doable and impossible, depending on which state you picture.  States like New York and California seem handily up to the task.  Wyoming, Missouri, Arkansas … not so much.  The more realistic way to picture the million kid march is to think of it akin to the House of Representatives.  As any kid who took high school civics knows (and let’s face it, lots of us got a lesson in advanced civics when we realized that Hillary got the most votes, but Trump is the new president), we have a Senate and a House of Representatives, the Senate having two elected representatives per state, and the House of Representatives having numbers that vary per state, depending on the population of the particular state in question.  A quick cruise to Wikipedia can not only explain the brilliant symmetry of this bicameral system, but will offer a table of the exact number of representatives.  If the expectation of marching kids per state were roughly analogous to the representatives for each state, then the “responsibilities” and “expectations” of each state, in terms of providing kids marching against trump, becomes immediately clearer. 

Listen up, this gets a wee bit thick:

There are 435 representatives total, in the House Of.  Divide one million by 435, and you come up with 2298.85057471.  We will, of course, round that off to 2300.   So, just as more densely populated states have more representatives (California has 53 and New York has 27), and just as states with sparser populations have fewer reps (Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota each have just 1 representative), so we could expect that the states with much larger populations might be able to rally a greater march of kids (and their parents).   Of course, it goes without saying that the redness or blueness of any given state would also impact a state’s performance. But let’s face it; there are a hell of a lot of frustrated Democrats inhabiting “red” states.  And most of those Democrats have kids.  This is the time for those feisty and frustrated spirits to express themselves. 

So I am hoping that you get my numerical drift:   States like Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, Delaware, and Alaska would only have to contribute 2300 marching kids each to help us achieve our goal.   However, California, sprawling across the left coast, would be under more pressure:  with 53 Representatives, they would have to produce 121,900 (2300 times 53) to produce their “share” of the Million Kid March.  According to the California Department of Education, there are 6,235,520 kids going to school in that state, which mean, in order to produce their “share” in the Million Kid March, only one out of every 2711 kids (6,235,520 divided by 2300) would have to walk away from their X-Box and march down the street and get some goddam fresh air and do their part to save the future of the planet.  Again, so very doable.

(Sidebar: with a whimsy I have come to expect from the crazy state of California, where I lived seventeen years of my life, I could not help but notice that on the official cde.gov site, where they list the actually number of schools in California [I instead counted kids], the official site lists the number of schools, mysteriously enough, at “10,3939”.      California.  Gotta love it.)

So there you get a general idea of the math, using the House of Representatives as a template, apportioning out the expectations of each state according to their populations.  Frankly, I find it thrilling how realistic it sounds.

And what if we don’t get a million kids, marching against Trump on Inauguration Day?  What if we don’t get half a million?  What if, thanks to the fervent and planet-saving efforts of the legions of kids and grown-ups reading this, what if we only get thousands of kids marching from their schools to some cherished local monument, each of them capable of reciting, through a new understanding, the appalling facts and figures, the terrifying reality, of a world ruled by Trump?  Everybody from the tiniest local news station to the biggest members of the Fourth Estate would no doubt find it irresistible.  These are kids, pleading for mercy and reason, after all.

And over and over and over again, from his morning session in the tanning bed through his dopey inaugural balls with his supermodel wife (or I guess Ivanka, who is to be his true new dancing partner and First Lady), the camera would find itself moving away from the Tangerine Man, and onto to faces of the Future of America.

And that is exactly how it should be.
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AN OPEN LETTER TO DONALD TRUMP AND HIS SUPPORTERS

11/14/2016

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​By Meg Langford

 
There may not be much in this letter that smacks of originality.  Mr. Trump, you simply do not inspire novel thoughts.  Your words do not help people to dream, imagine, or otherwise fantasize about some different, better world—unless it is to return to a kingdom in American’s distant past, where white people reign supreme, and people of more swarthy complexions clean your house, scrub your toilet, cook your meals, iron your shirts, and pick the crops in your field.  But no—other than imagining a time that is happily gone with the wind, you do not inspire your political opponents with fresh, new ideas.  Rather, you frighten us with old dreads, buried fears, and the kind of hate that we keep thinking we had left behind in our dream to climb to the mountaintop.

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Yet I write this letter, nonetheless.  Full disclosure:  I am no bleeding heart liberal.  I am not a registered Democrat.  I am not a person who lines up with the blue states and checks all the progressive squares on the ballot box.  I have sometimes voted Republican. Coming from an Air Force family that has recognized both the need for a strong national defense, and the personal pride that comes from pulling one’s self up by one’s boot straps, I am prepared to vote for a Republican candidate, from time to time, under certain conditions.  When I lived in Los Angeles, for example, and the local Democratic congressional incumbent lived happily, cozily in the pockets of rich music executives (remember when they wanted to install a virus that would blow up your computer if you so much as downloaded “Muskrat Love” or Rocky IV?), I worked pro-bono for an upstart Republican congressional candidate.  He and his wife spent more time volunteering for civic causes and fighting for the underdog than any two people I have ever met, and in a strange passage of months where every day felt like backwards day, Republican David Hernandez sure acted like a hippie (his wedding march music was “Light My Fire”), and the incumbent liberal Congressman in the music moguls’ pockets acted mighty Republican.

So there it is.  Full disclosure.  Mr. Trump,  I get you.  I understand you.  And I believe that I understand your supporters.  Having lived in the heart of Mexifornia, where illegal aliens run amok, I get your folks’ concerns about the border.  About Mexicans.  And as I watch the hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Middle-Eastern men flooding into Europe, many complaining about the free food and shelter they are getting while shrieking “Allahu Akbar”, I understand your concern about letting mobs of un-vetted refugees in from places that seem oh so alien to us.  I get a lot of your policies, Mr. Trump.  And I get why they are so damnably attractive to those rabid followers who show up at your rallies and come eerily close to giving you, en masse, the Nazi salute.

But, Mr. Trump, there is an old adage which applies to you.  And no, it has nothing to do with oranges or tangerines or your hair or your bizarre fake tan.  The adage is, “You can’t have Falstaff, and have him thin.”  Although this pearl of wisdom first appears in the extraordinary movie “Tucker”, it feels much older.  Falstaff was a zaftig, fun-loving knight in three of Shakespeare’s plays; he lived life to the fullest and indulged himself in all creature pleasures.  He was marvelous company for the likes of King Hal, and this was probably because of his carefree decadence.  In other words:   You aren’t going to go out and telling drinking stories and sing pub songs all night with Tony Robbins.  And if you want a gym buddy to go to the fitness center with you at 7:00 a.m., Mick Jagger is probably not your man.

I bring all this up in relation to Trump because it aptly describes the essence of his campaign.  Yes, oh Trump followers, I get your concerns about the Mexicans and Middle Easterners, about the border and the trade deals and the jobs crisis and the crime rate.  The problem is this: if Trump even begins to give you the solutions to these problems (which, in and of itself is highly doubtful—more on that some other time), I can guarantee you that along with the solutions will come a host of nightmares, and a legion of devils, the likes of which you can barely imagine.  Because that, folks, is how Trump does business.  That, folks, is the true history of Trump.

You can’t have someone who is going to do the things Trump has promised to do, without unleashing, along with his (final) solutions, a wave of hatred, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, and just good old fashioned outright contempt for any “Losers” who haven’t managed to become rich, powerful, and able to buy themselves a troika of hot supermodel wives.

And once that tsunami of contempt is unleashed … watch out, world.  It cannot be contained.  If I may bring in another metaphor, it is like the brooms with sloshing buckets in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  Except that Mickey was cute.  And he had a twelfth hour Gandalfian savior.  We have nothing to stop the flood, once Trump gets started.

​The bottom line is this:  Trump has openly—OPENLY—displayed overt contempt for so many kinds of people and groups of people that he has no business being in any kind of public office.  Much less—oh my God, I cannot believe I am writing this—much less, the most powerful political office on the planet.  (And even the planet is trembling in mortal fear.  The finest minds on Earth tell us that we may be reaching the point of no return, when it comes to the catastrophic effects of Climate Change—and Trump thinks it is a Chinese plot.  Already, he is boasting of his plans to trash the Paris Climate Treaty.  A President is supposed to represent all the people, protect all the people, champion all the people.

But Donald Trump?  Donald Trump hates (almost) all of the people.  And the truth is in the math.


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                                                        TRUMP: HATE BY THE NUMBERS

Hatred—and the tragically deformed litter of offspring it has whelped: disdain, contempt, condescension, ridicule, shunning, mockery, bullying, violence—is hard to quantify. 

Or so they say.

I am not so sure I agree, Mr. Trump.  I think when it comes to you—perhaps because you never, ever shut up—it is in fact quite possible to quantify.  Where to start?  Where to start?

There was the putrid panache with which you began your campaign:  “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people.” Well, Mr. Trump.   Roughly 18 percent of the country is now Latino.  That’s nearly one out of five people living in this country who, I think it is fairly clear, you simply DESPISE.  (Or, dear reader, pick appropriate name from the litter listed above, also known as Hate’s Offspring. (read basket of abhorribles) above.  Donald, one in five of us, standing here in America, you hate.

And then there is the abundant evidence that you hate blacks. One out of every eight Americans is an Afro-American. And you clearly don’t think much of them.  You didn’t like them in the early beginnings of your career, when you were sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against blacks and keeping them from accessing your apartment buildings.  And then, the Justice Department sued you again for the same thing, three years later.  And the racism charges and lawsuits just kept on coming.  In 1992, you were fined by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission because when high rollers requested that you remove black card dealers from the floor, you complied with their racist requests.  It cost you $200,000, but that’s chump change to you.  One black employee testified that it was standard operating procedure for casino managers to remove all black employees from the floor, before you and Ivana entered the casino.  According to former president of Trump Plaza Hotel John O’Donnell, in his biography of you, you frequently called black employees “lazy”.  And then there was this toad that jumped out of your mouth, also according to O’Donnell: “And isn’t it funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it … the only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”  And it gets worse:  “I think the guy is lazy … And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”

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In 1989, your infamy grew when you attempted to thwart the judicial process, following the rape of a Central Park jogger.  Rather than waiting for the investigation to play out, you bought full page ads in four newspapers, calling for the return of the death penalty.  You spared no eloquence:  “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes … I want to hate these murderers and I always will.”  You basically called for a lynch mob:  public hysteria ran high, five teenagers of color were convicted, and their lives were ruined.  In 2002, DNA exonerated them all, and the true rapist confessed, DNA further confirming his guilt.  But you had wreaked your havoc and destruction.  Not only did the men lose over a decade of their young lives languishing in jail, but their families were constantly threatened.  And Donald--you have recently stated that you still think the men are guilty.  You know more than the DNA does, apparently.  When you publicly railed on about it so many decades ago, you made a chillingly prescient comment: "Maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done.”  Perhaps we should have listened more closely.

We could go on and on, but this list and litany of racist horror stories is everywhere.  Even on the campaign trail, Donald, you were racism personified.  You retweeted a message from @WhiteGenocideTM that contained phony crime statistics.  And Donald, you and your White Supremacist cohorts didn’t just get it wrong.  You got it BIGLY wrong.  The following comes direct from the FBI.  (Whom we know, from events just pre-election, is hardly anti-Trump.)  You said the percentage of White people killed by other Whites was a mere 16 percent. That’s a lie. Whites kill each other at a rate of 82.4 percent.  You got it wrong by 66.4 percent, in a pathetic attempt to mask the truth about how many white thugs there are out there in the world—many of whom no doubt voted for you.  And, keeping the Nazi drumbeat going, you Tweeted that Blacks kill Whites at a rate of 81 percent.  Lie, lie, lie.  Blacks kill Whites at a rate of a mere 14.8 percent.  Again, a HYUGE error, off by 66.2 percent—made on purpose no doubt, in an attempt to make Blacks look like violent thugs en masse.  There is no such evidence of that, anywhere.  At all.

You condoned the beating of a black protestor at one of your rallies. "Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” is what you said.  We understand if your henchmen want to escort him from your rally.  But your suggestion of employing physical brutality is typical of you—hatred and violence are your stock in trade.

And when you finally did “reach out” at another rally, in some bizarre attempt at inclusion, it was with a condescension that makes a decent person’s skin crawl.  At a stop in California, you pointed to a black man and said, "Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him," Trump said. "Are you the greatest?"  What Donald, just the one?   It is hard to hear that without flashing back to Paula Deen, pulling one of her Negro employees from backstage, claiming him as a dear friend, and pointing out “he’s as black as this board!”

And you clearly hate people from the Middle East.  In your eyes, they are all terrorists.  With folks from the Middle East comprising between 3 and 4 percent of the population, that means that in an average crowd of Americans, you automatically hate one out of thirty people just because they don’t look Scottish, like your mom.  (Who was an immigrant by the way, Donald.  A poor immigrant. Dare I say it—a loser?  It seems too weird to call her a rapist or a drug dealer.)  Or maybe you hate people from the Middle East because they don’t worship the same God you do. Although, for what it is worth, I sure as hell hope that my God is not the same as your God, for they seem to be saying very, very, very different things.

You clearly are not a fan of the Jewish people.  There was your famous Tweet of Hillary Clinton on a Star of David atop a pile of cash.  Blatantly anti-Semitic, Donald.  And when your campaign decided to delete the Tweet, you objected.   More anti-Semitism?  You thought it was cool to quote the anti-Semite Benito Mussolini.  You had your typical lame justification—you said it was “a good quote.”  Over two thousand years of wisdom pumped into the universe by the best and the brightest, and your Bartlett’s Quotations fell open to Il Duce.  Il Duce, who was the driving force behind  ‘Leggi Razziali’  (aka, “The Race Laws”, “A Manifesto of Race”), which is basically a fan letter to the author of Mein Kempf, and the beginning of the end for Jews in Italy.  Your camp later Tweeted a bunch of Nazi soldiers superimposed over an American flag next to your big orange face.  And when the KKK endorsed you, you took your sweet time in distancing yourself from them.  As with all the groups you hate, I could go on and on with examples.

And what about poor people?   Donald, you made your opinion of poor people very clear, in a New York Times story by Maureen Dowd.  “My entire life, I’ve watched politicians bragging about how poor they are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents and grandparents were.  And I said to myself, if they can stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn’t the kind of person we want to be electing to higher office. How smart can they be?  They’re morons.”  Well, Donald, according to everybody from the U.S. Census Bureau to the Pew research center, about 29 percent of Americans are either poor or low-income.  I am going out on a limb here, believing that someone doesn’t actually have to be living below the poverty line for you to feel contempt for them—how did you so eloquently put it—for them to be “morons”.  So that means that you think that somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of the United States are “morons”.  Thanks, Donald.  You know, since the great crash of 2009, when I lost every penny of equity in my home, I basically fit into that group. Yes, I have worked very hard since that time, and yes, I have a plan that is on course.  But I am in that class of people.  A lower income loser. I got my B.A. at George Mason (awarded “Outstanding Senior of the Year”, my Masters at the American University, and did my doctoral work at the University of Maryland, but to you I am “a moron.” Thanks, Donald.

Oh, and while we are on the subject of “morons”, I think it is worth comparing the average teacher’s salary with the magic number that makes somebody “low income”.  If a teacher and spouse dare to have two children—imagine that, someone who devotes their life to teaching wanting to have two children of their own—then yes, statistically, their salary puts them smack in the lower income level—a number in the mid-40’s.  Roughly 45,000.   That’s what we pay them.  And they are morons for making such a moronic life choice, Donald?  Or perhaps we are the morons, because that’s all we can see they are worth. 

And then, of course, there is the now famous incident of Trump mocking and imitating a reporter with a disability. Serge Kovaleski, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, suffers from arthrogryposis. This is terrifying, not just because it is an assault upon anybody and everybody with a sense of human decency, but because it gives an eerie glimpse into how Trump views people with disabilities.  It must be their fault.  It must be a weakness.  They must be “Losers”.  And the bald fact is according to all the institutions who track that sort of thing—the Census Bureau, CDC, etcetera—one in five Americans lives with a disability.  So on the basis of that alone, Trump thinks another 20 percent of the country are “Losers”.   And suitable to be mocked.  But here is the thing, Donald:  those people have opinions, many of them very wise and informed opinions.  If a blind person dared to criticize you, would you do a hilarious impression of a that person tapping his cane around, searching for the next safe step?  Would that get a rise from your crowd?  What about a person with muscular dystrophy?  Let’s watch you imitate their walk.  That’s the kind of cruel stunt that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap and my butt smacked when I was a kid.  In fact, I don’t know any decent kid on the playground past the age of ten who would try something so offensive.  Anybody who did something like that, back in the day, we all just knew was going to grow up to be an a**hole. 

Lastly, of course, there is Trump’s ubiquitous and never ending misogyny.  We don’t care if you don’t like some of us ladies, Donald, but for Chrissake, take on our opinions, our thoughts, our plans, our platforms.  To judge us by our appearance is—well, I don’t really know if it can be described in words, just how utterly offensive that is to us.  I would really, truly love to get inside the brains of the women who voted for you, and find out what they were thinking … how they could elect as President a man who clearly has contempt for half of the citizenry of this great nation.  I cannot believe I am saying this, but I hope—I truly hope, women-for-Trump, that your daughters confront you relentlessly and ruthlessly when they are old enough to understand what you did.  I hope they give you a damnably hard time, and rebel against you.  And this is not because I wish to see acrimony and divisiveness within a family, but because that appalled confrontation from the next generation of young women is the only way I know there can be any hope for this country.  And right now, I place the future of this country above the well-being of your family—at least in terms of peace around your dinner table. 

Let’s take a moment to look at Donald’s stance on pro-choice.  Trump has actually stated that women who have abortions should be punished.  He makes no distinction (as persons such as myself do), that an abortion within the first couple of months of pregnancy is a mighty different proposition than late term abortion.  He doesn’t care if it is your daughter who is pregnant.  No, just, they should be punished.  That’s Trump’s view.  This viewpoint is rendered particularly repulsive, given his self-admitted history of pushing himself on women sexually.  Apparently, he doesn’t mind impregnating them.  Just giving them the right to do something about it.

Once more, for old times, here it is:  You have called women Fat. Slob.  Pig.  Disgusting animal. You said that nobody would vote for Carly Fiorina because of her face.  Are you serious, Donald?  Are you serious?  Do you really think American voters are that superficial?  And Donald, have you looked in the mirror?  You have a mouth too small for your face, lips that look like they were dropped in by CGI effect.  You have raccoon eyes because nobody in your circle, even your wife, will tell you how to get a decent fake tan.  And I am not even going to start with the Tangerine jokes or hair mockery. 

​But back to what you think about women.  When The New York Times columnist Gail Collins dared to criticize you, you mailed her article back to her with “FACE OF A DOG” scrawled across her picture.

And there was the comment you made in a 1991 Esquire Magazine interview:  "You know, it doesn't really matter what [they] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass."

And then there was the 1992 New York Magazine interview when you said, you actually said about women, “You have to treat them like shit.”

And your disrespect is not reserved just for your enemies or strangers:  You said of Ivana: “I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?”  And then there’s the creep factor you just had to inject:  you joked that you would date your daughter, if you could.  Beyond disgusting.  And then, there was the comment that made our collective pieholes drop open in shocked disbelief:  When Robin Leach asked you and Marla what parts of you and your wife you could see in your precious newborn baby, you had to reference your baby’s breasts.  And their growth potential…   

And of course there was the time you kept a picture of your secretary in your desk drawer; you thought she looked chubby in the photo.  You would look at it when you got annoyed with her.  You liked how that act served to humiliate her.  She claims the story is true, you denied it.  You know what, Donald?  I am going with her word.  Just as I am going with the testimonies of all the women who claim you sexually assaulted them.  This is because I, like millions of other horrified citizens, heard you not only admit to it, but brag about it.  Just as you brag about walking through the dressing room of your teenage beauty pageant and ogling the girls as they change clothes and stand around semi-naked.

In the words of Detroit Free Press journalist Brian Dickerson, “If your sons bragged about their sexual prowess or intellectual superiority the way Trump does, you’d tell them to put a sock in it. If any man spoke about your wives or daughters the way Trump speaks about my female colleagues in the press, you’d punch his lights out.”  In my words:  Mr. Trump, you have a very barely contained disdain—perhaps hatred, even—for half of the population of this country.   Yes.  I believe that.  Do you need to hear it again?  Mr. Trump, you have a very barely contained disdain—perhaps hatred, even—for half of the population of this country.  Because half of us are women, and, to paraphrase the premise of an old Seinfeld episode, most of us are not “10”s.  Most of us are not even “8”s.  We are just hard working mothers and career women and professionals and volunteers who realized long, long ago that an excessive obsession with one’s personal appearance represents a kind of narcissism that is both unnecessary and offensive. We put on clean clothes, a dab of lipstick, a squirt of imposter perfume, and hope that our smile will make us attractive to a world that we are desperately doing our part to save.  Shame on you, Mr. Trump, for the way you treat the gender that has given birth to every single one of your twisted supporters.  What the hell would your own mother think of you, I wonder?  I mean, if you could really, really hear what she thought of what you have been saying and doing for the last year. 

And stop letting your teenage daughter sit provocatively on your lap when you pose for pictures atop a statue of two parrots fornicating, as she lovingly cradles her face in your hand.  I say this because, since Melania has aged out (if past statistics are any indicator), you may well have a new hot young wife, and then, soon to follow, a hot young teenage daughter.  Please, Donald, do your best to keep your hands off of her, too.

And what if someone is successful enough to own their own business?  Do you respect them then, Donald?  Nope.  Here are some examples of just how deeply you hold in contempt the very hard-working businessman.  (Sources not cited here, since these incidents are ubiquitous on the web, and corroborated by court records.)

Michael Diehl of Freehold Music Center recalls that he sold you eight Yamaha grand pianos for 100,000 dollars.  You wouldn’t pay, and forced Diehl to settle for 70 cents on the dollar.  Sign maker Eric Silverstein remembers working on the Trump Plaza signage, and asking you, The Donald, to pay the agreed upon 800,000 dollars.  You kept refusing, then forced Silverstein to settle for one third of what you had promised.  (“Promise”:  look up this important word in the dictionary, Donald.  If you don’t have a dictionary, now would be a good time to buy one.  It is connected, in principle, to the idea of taking an “Oath of Office”.)  A sucker who owned a store called the Paint Spot never got paid his 34,000; but you blew that one.  The Donald was so blatant in his rip-off tactics that you ended up owing Paint Spot owner 300,000 in legal fees. Ha ha.  Curiously, that was the same amount—34,000--that you stiffed the owner of Classic Chandeliers.  Trump, you bought three huge, probably gaudy chandeliers, a bunch of bulbs, and then didn’t pay the amount agreed.

The fiberglass company that made the faux minarets and domes for the Taj Mahal was owed 3 million dollars.  From you, Donald.  The fiberglass factory crew had been run ragged, trying to finish the pieces while dealing with your constantly changing demands.  They worked in three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  You kept refusing to pay, then settled for 33 cents on the dollar. 

Back in 1990, sixty struggling union men had to be benched from working on the Taj Mahal because you kept refusing to pay them, even after the Taj Mahal was open and thriving.  Oh, and thanks to you, Donald, they all lost their medical insurance and their pensions.  At the time they were laid off, just after the Taj opened, you owed 253 contractors who were employing thousands of people a whopping 70 million dollars.  They ended up getting 50 cents on the dollar. 

Atlantic City’s Mayor is no fan of yours.  He has stated publicly, “The fact is, there were a lot of small contractors and vendors who got hurt, who went out of business because Trump did not pay contracts on time.”  

Patricia Paone’s memory was long, and Donald, when you first started your campaign, she saw your face on TV and could only think of the nightmare that you caused her family when you refused to pay her late husband the 1.2 million dollars you owed for Taj Mahal paving stones.  She died shortly after seeing The Donald on TV. 

And if someone doesn’t own their own business, and is stoopid enough to be hired by you, then they deserve to be stiffed, right?   You didn’t pay 300 employees at your Los Angeles golf club; you eventually settled the class action lawsuit for 475,000.  Who knows what you really owed them, before settling.  A dishwasher sued you because you made him work time and a half, but didn’t write it in your books.  You settled for 7,500.  Given your propensity for settling for pennies on the dollar, and the fact that the guy cannot have had much of a legal team to fight you, one wonders what you really owed him.  Maybe 20,000 grand?  How was the guy supposed to live?  And at the Trump Miami resort, 48 servers had to sue to get paid when you made them work shifts as long as 20 hours during Passover.  Really, Donald?  You don’t even pay waiters their paltry little pay? 

And Donald.  Some of your cheap-skatedness is just plain hilarious.  There was the detective you hired to follow the detective that your wife Ivana hired to get proof of the affair you were having with Marla Maples.  He got you the proof.  He just never got paid for it.  Sheesh.

Before we leave this subtopic regarding all the businesses and struggling workers that Donald Trump has ripped off, it is worth noting a bit of karma.  Before I go into this story, I am reminded of a story out of ancient Rome.  And I am not the only one seeing the similarities.  San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, at the end of a passionate and insightful rant, said, of Trump’s election …“We are Rome”.  Chilling words, rendered even more frightening because of their prescient ring of truth. 

Here is my Roman story.  It is the true tale of a famous torture device, conceived of and created by a one Perillos of Athens, for Phalaris, the Tyrant of Akragas, Sicily.  This gorgeous torture device, known as The Brazen Bull, was a large hollow golden bull in which a victim was placed, via hinged door, then slowly burned alive, while a fire beneath the bull slow cooked the poor prisoner.  The “art” of the bull was the demonic way in which the screams of the tortured soul worked their way through a series of tubes in the bull’s head, and then the human screams came out through the bull’s mouth in such a way that it really did sound like a bull bellowing.  But here is the funny part.  First, it was used to torture the unfortunates who had offended the tyrant Phalaris.  Then, the inventor of the bull found himself thrown in the bull and roasted.  Then, when the tyrant ruler was overthrown, he ended up in the bull, being roasted alive.  For some reason, that is the story I flashed on when I read about the last group of people that Trump ripped off, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the decades; HIS OWN LAWYERS.   Ha!

(And yes,  you could say that my Roman analogy  is a bit of hyperbole, comparing ripping off your lawyers to burning a human being alive in the infamous Brazen Bull. 

Trump, after all, does not own a solid gold life sized bull in which to roast his enemies slowly to death.

Not yet.
 
                                                             *************
 
So there you have it.  A long, scary, depressing list of just some of the groups which Donald Trump clearly holds in contempt. The list is not complete though; I think we all understand that.

Of course, you would have to be an Uber Statistician (most of whom, oddly enough, are hiding out in caves, after the Hyuuge miscalculation of  Election Night), to figure out statistically exactly how many Americans Trump hates, because the above categories obviously cross over.  There are women who are black.  There are people from the Middle East who are poor.  Hey, here is an example:  Donald Trump called Charles Krauthammer a LOSER.  Does Donald Trump hate fellow party member Charles Krauthammer because he had the audacity to criticize Mr. Trump?  Or because he is a Jew?   Or, maybe, maybe it is because Charles Krauthammer is a big enough loser to have gotten himself in a wheelchair for life?  In fact, now that I think about it, Chuckie boy is a triple threat loser.  Criticized Trump.  Jew.  Crippled.  Loooser.

Mr. Trump, a man who disparages people from other races, other cultures, people with disabilities, virtually all women, and apparently anyone else who is not as successful as he is, has no business leading this nation.  He has no business being President.  My Lord, the Founding Fathers must all be spinning in their graves.  And yes, I know that the early days of the Founding Fathers were just as acrimonious today’s headlines.  But they were fighting over desperately important matters like federalism versus states’ rights—adult talk, for the grown-up table.   We were not talking in the public forum about whether we should elect to the highest office of the land a man who talks about his penis size at a presidential debate, and who encourages his followers to pummel those who disagree with him. And if any of you Troglodytic Trump supporters are talking back to this letter as you read it, muttering “You could say things every bit as bad about Hillary”, then I encourage you, sit down and pen that epistle.  Go for it.  Get it all out of your system.  That would require, of course, that you can in fact write a cogent sentence.

That’s about it.

And so—as I promised--there is not a great deal in this open letter to Donald Trump that is original. 

No revelations or bombshells.

But I don’t care about that.  Sometimes it is important not to say something different.

Sometimes it is important to echo the crowd, to corroborate your colleagues, and to generally be part of a groundswell of protest that relentlessly lists the sins and failings and evil agendas of a man who dares to aspire to lead this great country.  The Hallelujah Chorus is not rendered great because all of the singers are crooning a different tune, and when the distinct individuals gathered at a funeral put aside their personalities to collectively lose themselves in a recitation of the 23rd Psalm, it is that very act of unification that gives Psalm 23 its power, and, by proxy, the grieving souls new strength.  And in the hours following the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, when members of Congress—from both sides of the aisle, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—joined hands in signing” God Bless America”, it was poignantly reassuring that all those bickering brokers of labyrinthine laws and devious deals were, for one shining moment, putting aside their differences and lifting their voices in affirmation of this one, profoundly crucial unifying belief.   It is the land that we love.  It is our home sweet home.  We put aside our bickering to pray.

And that, my friends, gives me an idea.  Many articles have been written listing their litanies of grievances against The Donald, and the horrific lapses in decency committed by The Drumph, but this is perhaps once of the first  penned since he has been given the dubious title of President-Erect.  Sorry.  Elect.

So maybe this is the one thing that we can all agree on … all Democrats, all Independents, and any Republicans who have a shred of the old guard in them—Republicans like George Will and Peggy Noonan—perhaps we can all gather one of these days on the Capitol steps, and sing a new kind of anthem.  One about patriotism, and loyalty, and learning from the mistakes of our collective past.  America has survived many wars, and will survive many more. 
 
The question now is, how do we survive this second Civil War?
 
                                                               ************
 
To be sung to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

My eyes have watched in horror as the man announced his run
And it seemed for just a moment that the clouds blocked out the sun
As he hurled insults at Mexicans, I knew he’d just begun…
It seemed all hope was gone
 
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, his lies have just begun…..
 
As the months flew by each day would bring a new and sickening twist
There were riots, punches, mocking, threats as Donald grew more pissed
And the candidates who challenged him dropped slowly off the list
While Trump was pure Teflon..…
 
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah the joke’s no longer fun…..
 
We all watched the grand convention with a hope for some relief
But the count was killed and votes were stolen as though by a thief
But the worst was yet to come when Trump would mock a parent’s grief
God Bless You, Captain Khan…..
 
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, he mocked the Khan’s dead son
 
Then Hilary and Donald were both vying for the prize
But his followers seemed not to care about his endless lies
Donald taught them how to hit and hate and thoroughly despise
All decency was gone…..
 
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, It’s time to turn and run….
 
The women came, they all edged forward, timid and afraid
But the Donald just denied and mocked the charges that they made
In the end it was Melania who suffered and who paid
For the Tangerine Don Juan…..
 
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, I pity Donald’s son.
 
On the night of the election we were all glued to the news
Then the shock set in and every soul was thoroughly confused.
Now he’ll be the country’s president, and we must sing the blues--
Or write a different song…..
 
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Why’d you let the Trumpman fool ya?
Holy Crap and Hallelujah, the Tangerine Man won
 
Republicans and Democrats, both parties finally see
Trump is wrong for our great country, now we finally agree
As they reach across the aisle, there is hope for you and me,
While God is Marching On…
 
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Our God is Marching on.
​​​
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Angry White Man

11/6/2016

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We have always striven to provide original articles and stories, usually in Longform and heavy on the research.  But we have just come across what we feel to be the best piece of writing in this never-ending election cycle.  It was penned by Brian Dickerson of the Detroit Free Press, and we provide the link to that article here, with our heartfelt thanks to him for expressing what we have been feeling for so many months, but have not been able to articulate.  Dickerson does it masterfully.  Please share.

www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2016/11/05/trump-clinton-anger-white-men-deplorables-had-it-up-to-here-brian-dickerson/93341708/

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Two Writers and a Dare, Redux: Circus Interruptus

3/15/2016

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Dear Trump Supporters

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By Meg Langford

​Dear Trump Supporters.  I get it.  You want immigration to be monitored.  You want a wall.  You want immigrants whom you feel are taking your jobs to be deported.   I get it.  After 9/11, and the events throughout Europe, you want your Commander in Chief to be wary of radical Islamic immigrants.   I understand what you don’t want.   I understand why Trump inspires you.

What should terrify you is the bully in Trump.  The least presidential candidate that we’ve ever had, Trump has clearly advocated raw violence, even as he hypocritically urges his followers to “Go in peace.”  He has a history of agitating his crowds:  “Knock the crap out of him, will you?”…… “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.”   And this from the crowd:  "Shoot him!" "Kick his ass," and "Light the motherfucker on fire!"  And, according to observers, a large middle aged man shouted, "Sieg heil!"

​Yes, perhaps more shocking than anything else, he is encouraging a Nazi salute.  He is displaying a Nazi salute.  And I beg you not to equivocate on this.  The pictures are not of people raising their hands high.  The pictures are not of how you swear to tell the truth in a court of law.  The pictures are of a Nazi salute, and there is no way in hell that Trump does not know that—and, by implication, condone everything represented by a Nazi salute.   And if, in some alternate universe, Trump does not know that he is offering up a Nazi salute, and asking for one in return, then he is just too stupid to be president.   And for the record, Trump is also a liar.  He knows exactly who David Duke is.
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BREAKING NEWS CHICAGO TRIBUNE.  CANDIDATE’S RALLY ENDS ABRUPTLY AS VIOLENCE ERUPTS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE HALL

3/12/2016

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By Mike Pickwick

​Chicago.  Trump, presidential candidate, clipped a speech short tonight as wild, chair-swinging violence erupted at a rally in the large Chicago hall.  Police moved in quickly to quell a flurry of fist fights that broke out near the arena floor as Trump supporters and some of several thousand hecklers clashed, first with fists, and then with folding chairs and placard standards.
 
Moments later, Trump, just getting warmed up in his routine campaign speech, abruptly left the podium after a hurried conclusion to his remarks.  He was whisked from the hall by Police.
 
H.O. Bunch, a private police lieutenant, said about a dozen hecklers were arrested.  In a city torn by racial strife, Trump continued tonight his practice of taunting his hecklers, both black and white, who chanted continuously as Trump spoke. 
 
Trump supporters struck handcuffed hecklers as they were being led away by police, who did not interfere.  One plainclothes policemen, using a pair of handcuffs and brass knuckles, cut the face of a heckler who shoved him. 
 
Scuffles broke out even before Trump arrived, one of them during the playing of the National Anthem, when Trump supporters pummeled a group of demonstrators and tore their signs.  Police used an irritating chemical spray to break up the melee.
 
Trump was only 20 seconds into his campaign speech, the part in which he introduced a group of Alabama labor figures travelling with him, when he unleashed his first taunt at the hecklers.  In recent campaign days, Wallace has welcomed hecklers, shouting back at them to elicit exuberant cheers from supporters. 
Reporters circulating in the crowd ran into frequent encounters with Trump supporters, but police were always close at hand.  Hundreds of law enforcement agents in both uniform and plainclothes roamed through the hall.   Officials decline to reveal how many.
 
Most of the hecklers were in two balconies of the large arena and were hemmed in by helmeted police.  The scene was similar to that of last Thursday night, when 3500 policemen kept a tight security lid on New York City’s new Madison Square Garden for a Trump rally. 
 
Earlier today in Enid, Oklahoma, Trump may have made a mistake in handling another group of orderly demonstrators.  The demonstrators were likened by the candidate to hippies and those who fly the Viet Cong flag and raise blood and funds for communist forces in the Vietnam War….
 
This blustery presidential candidate, full of braggadocio and bigotry, would take a bullet from a shooter whose heart was filled with hate and a lust for fame—ironic, given whom he was shooting.  The controversial candidate would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.  Such is the full circle of hate.  Such is the universe of political karma. 
 
As you may have guessed by now, the candidate described above is not Donald Trump, but Alabama Governor George Wallace, when he was running for president in the tumultuous election year of 1968.  But what is so damnably eerie is the resemblance that this article covering the aborted Wallace rally bears to the aborted Trump rally of March 11th 2016.   We have only changed the name, and the city.
 
The similarities are chilling.  And should be frightening to Donald Trump, if he is as prescient as he imagines himself to be.  Wallace, like Trump, was no friend of political correctness, often belligerently engaging protestors in the crowds, and urging his supporters on to violence.  Wallace also would have had a mighty moral struggle distancing himself from the Ku Klux Klan.  George C. Wallace Jr., 45th Governor of Alabama, would have understood the appeal of Donald Trump. 
 
Returning for a moment to the rally held in Enid, Oklahoma, earlier that day in 1968, Wallace somehow failed to recognize that his protesters (I guess he didn’t know then that all he had to do was to have them thrown out; he could have learned so much from Trump) were not anti-war protesters.  No, they were actually several hundred students from nearby Phillips University, in ministerial training at the conservative evangelical school.  If Wallace had been paying attention, he would have observed that their protest was not leftist, liberal, or anti-war.  It was couched in very different terms. To quote from the actual newspaper report about the signs, “Some were biblically oriented, such as ‘Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters!  And righteousness Like a flowing stream.  Wash out Wallace!’ ”
 
Sadly, today’s Evangelical Christian voters no longer hold their candidates to such high standards.  The polls indicate that even Trump’s Christian supporters are only interested in what he can “get done” for them, and they simply cover their ears when he waxes profane during his speeches.  Yesterday, so called Evangelical Christian Dr. Ben Carson endorsed Donald Trump for President.  What do you think the student ministers protesting at Wallace’s rally would have thought of Carson’s endorsement?   For that matter, consider the nine Christians shot dead in Charleston, South Carolina, during a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 2015.  Murdered by an angry young white supremacist, whose views are frighteningly similar to those professed by some Trump supporters--what might they have to say to the good doctor?  Or the candidate he now trumpets?
 
What does it say to American voters, nearly fifty years later, that a candidate preaches hate, and proudly presides over campaign events as ugly as that generated by the doomed George Wallace?  In 2016, we may not be using our political voices to proclaim what we would have America stand for, but instead, whether or not we care that America stands at all.
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