Rocket Man and Dotard go bonkers in Toontown
Pity the Pacific, a portion of which faces ultimate destruction should “Rocket Man” follow through on his threat to test a hydrogen bomb in the ocean in response to recent anti-North Korea comments from President “Dotard.”
So it goes in Toontown, where two of the planet’s most unstable state actors call each other names and spin the roulette wheel toward nukes and annihilation.
Within days of Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly last week, in which he threatened to “totally destroy North Korea” and referred to Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man,” tensions escalated from a game of blind man’s bluff to a drag race of nuclear chicken.
“I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire,” proclaimed Kim, who apparently relied upon a translation tool that uses archaic English vocabulary. Millions wondered, “Dotard?”
Racing to our dictionaries, we learned that the word means, more or less, an old person of diminished mental capacity. Popular as far back as the 14th century when Chaucer used it in “The Canterbury Tales.”
It seems that I’ve seen this movie before. Or perhaps it was a comic-book series written by “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams, who lately has become an internet sensation as a wry devil’s advocate favoring Trump.
How this unfunny comedy resolves itself is anyone’s guess, which is the problem, isn’t it?
In another time of nuclear tensions, it’s hard to imagine President John F. Kennedy calling Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev “Tricky Niki” or Khrushchev responding in kind.
But the memory of nuclear war was fresher then, the effects still raw and horrifying. Even the testing of a hydrogen bomb in or over the ocean can have disastrous environmental effects and should be condemned with at least as much outrage as Trump managed to muster toward NFL players.
As even Rocket Man probably knows, then 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the anthem last fall to protest police brutality. Dotard made reference to the presently unsigned player during a rally in Alabama.
When a player refuses to pay proper respect to the flag, Trump said, the team’s owner should say, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired. Fired!”
Whereupon, 200 or so other players (and some coaches and owners) joined the protest, and “taking a knee” became the raised fist of a broad spectrum of Americans disgusted with the U.S. Dotard. Not only was Trump’s interference beneath the presidency, but he managed to escalate a relatively benign, personal protest into a national movement in a transparently racial way.
One may disagree with the manner of protest. But the flag and anthem represent more than one president or one moment in history. To many, it should be a small thing to show respect for generations of Americans who have fought and died for the freedoms others enjoy, including the right to protest.
Which would have been a fairly easy thing for a president to say, if he were of sound mind and character. Since this is obviously not the case, we might all take a knee — and pray that we and the planet survive the Dotard and the Rocket Man.