Writer’s old bugaboos flare up when racist Trump pontificates

I have been trying hard — I actually thought I was succeeding — to keep my shoes clean by ignoring the volumes of excrement that American politicians have been shovelling around in the name of National strength and freedom ever since the presidential election of last year.

It’s not easy to be a writer and stand silent while the atrocities that are devouring our southern neighbour play themselves out of the world’s stages.

I have worked hard at telling myself that it’s too easy to be sucked into wasting my time wailing unheard in public about things I can’t change. I’ve been fighting to leave all the finger pointing to the late night comics and the left wing media, in the belief that people’s good sense and goodwill will win out eventually.

Then, last week came along, and Charlottesville with its shockingly new reality. Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists causing civil disturbance and death in the streets of America and being supported by the president of the United States in person.

Sure, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed to wag a finger at Trump after. After is always too late — as late as Porky Donald’s belated, but false apology, days after the event but only one day before his reversal and suckback of that apology.

All my old bugaboos flared up at once, and immediately: why aren’t more people decrying this? When are American Republicans going to ‘fess up that they endorsed a moron in the White House? How much more evidence to they need? What more will it take to convince them?

You might think they’d be at least a little shaken by a president, nominally theirs, openly backing and sustaining Neo-Nazis and lobotomized White Supremacists in the country he is supposed to lead and inspire, but you would be wrong. Senator Orrin Hatch has said, for the record, that he has never known a man less prejudiced or less influenced by skin colour.

Hatch is a primary pillar of the Republican Community. So if people like him —t he guys who run the Government — won’t even recognize or admit what is going on, then what potential does that offer for other, less powerful people to intervene and make things right?

The Germans put a buffoon into supreme power back in the early-to-mid-Thirties. Look what happened then. Before the depths of that man’s cannibalistic psychoses had been analysed, he made Trump look almost benevolent.

You’ll find many people out there praising Trump because he has no governing experience. You will find others condemning him equally for being duplicitous, self-serving and undependable upon any topic that does not benefit him or his family personally, but you’ll have to go digging for that information.

You’ll read a lot, too, about how having no fixed political affiliation can be beneficial, but you’ll find nothing at all about the grotesquely evil potential that lies in unchecked, malignant narcissism — the sole undisputed attribute that, in the eyes of both parties, the U.S. president holds beyond dispute.

He holds it in common with Stalin, Hitler, Putin, Mussolini and every other dictator.

This week, I watched the first three episode’s of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on Netflix TV and its inhumanity, seen in juxtaposition with the events in Charlottesville, appalled me.

The novel offers a dystopian view of a fictional America in which a plague has virtually wiped out the race’s ability to reproduce.

Power has been seized by a coalition of unnamed, neo-christian fundamentalist militia groups that have reversed all the advances in human rights and privileges of the past few hundred years.

They condemn and punish with death anyone suspected of being sexually deviant or immoral and returning women to the status of slaves and chattels.

The perspective Atwood reveals in her work is one of deep, moral despair in a future devoid of either hope or grace — not merely for the fertile women forced to serve as handmaids to the marital needs of society’s leaders, but also for the men who must live without hope of ever fathering their own progeny.

I’m not half way through the development of the story at this point, though, so the possibility exists that there will be a ray of hope in there somewhere; that hope and good sense will triumph before the story climaxes and fades to a resolution.

Right now, though, looking south at those hate-filled yahoos screaming their terror of everything in their lives that they can’t control, I wouldn’t rush out to wager my life’s savings on its happening.

American Republicans have tied the tails of their shirts to the befouled end of an angry bull who will be forever running counter to the way they want to go. They must be prepared to live with aftermath.

Jack Whyte is a Kelowna author of 15 best-selling novels. Email jack@jackwhyte.com or read more at jackwhyte.com.