This is my 99th Drug War Follies column for Skunk Magazine. They have let me run with it for about 12 years now, and I hope they let me keep on running. In any event, this one is political so if you hate politics, or my position, just skip it. Or read it anyway and then write hate mail!!!!!
DRUG WAR
FOLLIES #99
We have
met the enemy and we are fucked.
By Peter
Gorman
As a rational, reasonably intelligent citizen of the USA,
and one who has now been voting for 48 years, it bewilders me that Donald
Trump, the thief of New York, the con man of carneys, the troll l’orange, has wound up as president. What did we do? How did
it happen that we elected a guy with the intelligence of a can of Spam (sorry,
Spam), the soul of Machiavelli, and the heart of a rattle snake to be the
leader of the free world? What were his credentials going in? What did he
promise—to the people, not the devil—to earn this position? And what is going
to come of this errant experiment in populism?
I’m not
sure what you up in the Great White North think about this, but down here a lot
of us are going crazy on a daily basis, and with good reason. This guy is
killing us. His 3 AM Tweets knocking former President Obama, healthcare,
Hillary Clinton, the connection between his closest associates and Russian
intelligence in the lead up to the election are enough to make a sober man grab
for a pint, or a doper to reach for a needle and spoon. His refusal to display
his tax returns that might show where he could be compromised as president, his
insistent chanting to have Hillary locked up, his choice of Cabinet heads, from
a woman who hates public schools to head up the Department of Education, to a
man who wants to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency to head the EPA,
to Dr. Ben Carson, the man who says that slaves were immigrants who had to work
really hard to head up the Department of Housing, and all the rest of them
leave us baffled, bewildered, and yeah, reaching for a second, third and fourth
pint.
How did
this happen?
This is
a man who was caught saying he liked to grab women by the pussies on video tape
and yet 53 percent of white women voted for him. This is a man who said he
would bring back coal mining jobs to forlorn towns which didn’t lose coal
mining jobs to regulations, they lost them to animation and a disinterest in
coal given the glut of natural gas the US has had for years. This is the man
who promised a border wall after years of more Mexicans and other Central
Americans leaving the US voluntarily than arrive annually. This is a man who
claims the election was rigged and begged, on national television, Russian
spies to hack Hillary’s emails, then won and called the election not
rigged--though he did lie and say that the fact that he lost the popular vote
my more than 3 million was due to illegals voting. This is a man who lies
easier than he breathes. To help define his condition, the constant and abject
lying, his marble-mouthed spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway explained that he
simply has alternate facts—when there are no alternate facts. I have no idea
what actual color you see when you look at a clear sky, but we all agree to
call whatever we see “blue”. That is how society functions. There are no
alternate facts unless we want chaos.
But
then it seems this President Trump actually does want chaos. He claimed, for
years, that President Obama was not a US citizen, sent a posse to Hawaii where
he said the truth had been uncovered and would blow Obama out of the White
House, but never showed the proof. He swears he has proof that the election was
rigged but has no proof to show. He swears, on Twitter, that he was bugged at
the personal behest of President Obama, but has no proof, no incriminating
evidence, nothing. He just recently sent high-level advisors to monitor the
goings-on at each of his Cabinet departments and agencies to ascertain that
people are loyal to him and not leaking anything to the press. This is not democracy,
this is the extreme paranoia of a madman. He lied to his entire constituency
before the election that his healthcare plan would include everyone and cover
everyone better and for a lot less money than Obamacare, and now, in late
March, admits that millions of people will not be covered, but will have
access, if they have the funds, to medical insurance. The fact that tens of millions
obviously do not have the funds was the precise reason Obamacare was crafted
and drafted into law. The current president thinks it’s a great idea to go back
to the old way, despite it meaning he lied through his teeth to his voters and
that people will go back to being kicked off their insurance in the middle of
treatments, even if they have insurance.
This
man bullshits every time he opens his mouth. He has never met the truth in his
life. During his short time in office he’s pushed for mentally ill people to be
allowed to buy guns, for everyone to be able to buy silencers for their guns,
for rollbacks on guarding rivers and waterways from industrial waste, for
pushing to rescind the Russian sanctions so that his friend Rex Tillerson, now
Secretary of State, can have his former company, ExxonMobil, begin working on
the billion dollar deal he crafted with Putin prior to Trump’s unexpected win
at the polls. He has decried climate change science even while the sea rises
around us; proposed to cut off meals for old and sick people who have no way to
get out to get their own; he’s planning to defund Planned Parenthood, the
primary source of medical attention for two million women and hundreds of
thousands of men in the US because one branch of their operation—funded
privately, not with a cent from the federal or any state or local governments—performs
abortions. He has reinstituted the ban on any country that promotes birth
control to stop receiving foreign aid. He has put forward a budget that will
increase our military spending by $54 billion this year while phasing out money
for school lunches for kids, afterschool programs, endowments for the arts,
public radio and a host of programs that cost nearly nothing while educating
millions annually.
And he’s
done this while spending more on weekend retreats—and maintaining a wife in New
York who hates him—in two months, than former President Obama ever spent on
vacations in a year.
Then
there are his businesses, all 500 or so of them. Rather than divest himself of
them, he’s put his kids in charge of them and, what luck, they get secret
service protection, and probably an armed jet escort, wherever they go to do
business to make him money.
Folks,
we are in the Matrix and it is not pretty here. Things are out of whack.
But it
gets worse: His call to round up innocent illegal aliens who have been here
20-30 years, or were brought over before they could talk, has re-infused life
into the dying private prison industry. Yes, the private prison giants have
seen their stock prices soar wildly since his election. And then he has Jeffrey
Beauregard Sessions in the Attorney General slot and he has promised to look
hard at states where marijuana is legal. No, you did not think you were getting
away from this red-haired octopus, did you? Yes, by the time you read this he
will probably have started that war. Can you imagine him sending local police
or national guard into Colorado, Oregon, Washington or elsewhere to shut down
legal pot shops and grows?
Somehow,
this man, this man-child who pouts like a 3-year-old and acts like a
terrible-two, this short fingered vulgarian—to copy someone smarter than me at
perfect insults-—has managed to secure the Oval Office. And he has brought
Steve Bannon, a scum sucking—in all ways—piece of flotsam who has never done a
single thing worth noting in his entire life, into the Oval Office with him.
Bannon, the white nationalist whose term as head of Breitbart News was marked
by White Supremacist slogans, endorsements, paid advertisements.
How did
this happen? Were we all drugged? Were people just so angry at the idea of the
beautiful nigger in the white house that they would have drunk the toilet water
of anyone who shit into it just to get a white guy back into that place?
As the
head dies, so follows the body. We’re not doomed yet, but unless we change
things quickly, we are definitely in deep shit and the stink is only going to
get worse as people start dying from this freak’s programs.
Give me
a pint, bartender, and keep them coming till I puke, okay?
It would
all be funny if people weren’t dying and the prisons weren’t full.
aa