Troubling Times

The Trump stuff is starting to get a little scary. He’s like a cartoon character — a buffoon – and it’s hard to take his platform seriously.  After all, other than promising to build a wall, or make Mexico build a wall, he really hasn’t said anything. If you go by his history he’s even a little more liberal than his hapless opponents.

No, what’s worrying me are his followers.  Trump’s jingoistic, xenophobic banter has brought to the surface a virulent racism in this country, so much so that I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve progressed at all since the 1950s.

Coded racism has long been a staple of Republican (and even Democratic) candidates.  One need look no further than patron saint, Ronald Reagan launching his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County fair, a few miles away from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town associated with the 1964 murder of civil rights workers.  There, he used the term, states rights, a kind of code for tacitly approved racism.

But with the ascendance of Trump there is no longer a need for code words.  He can vilify Muslims and Mexicans, thus empowering rednecks across the land to speak their minds.  And I’m not just referring to the South.  There were plenty of racists in the New York metropolitan area six years ago when I lived there.  Drive ten miles in any direction from Manhattan and you’ll see what i mean.  Long Island and New Jersey are cesspools.

Even here in the Bay Area, one of the most liberal places on the planet, you can find racism.  A singer with whom I worked with just last night friended me on Facebook.  No sooner did I accept her request than I saw that her page was littered with racist posts.  One showed a pair of four or five year old African American boys teasing and hitting a white girl, with the implication that violence starts at a young age.  She also compared these children to Palestinians.

By itself the post is merely ignorance.  In light of the violence and bile we have seen at Trump rallies, however, it’s unsettling.  What level of racism would be unleashed should this man somehow gain the White House?

 

 

Sayonara Scalia

And just like that the Supreme Court has a chance to become a moral, humane body.  The Republicans will do their best to obstruct but they are a beaten party, their power waning faster than Nazgul’s after the ring was thrown into Mt Doom.

There is precedent to stall a Supreme Court appointment. In 1969 it took a Democratic Congress 391 days to appoint Harry Blackmun after Abe Fortas retired.  Bring it on, I say, because the next president will be a Democrat.  Wait a minute, what’s that I see in the distance?   Why it’s the clown car pulling up to the TV studio, and out pour the Republican candidates for president!

Scalia was proof that intelligence and education do not equate to morality.  He was a virulent racist and homophobe who wrote that African Americans belonged at ‘slower track,’less advanced  Universities.

He, like his fellow right wing Justices was an abomination.  He promoted states rights, which is thinly veiled code for white’s rights, and he was anti abortion, gay rights, and gun control.  He was a strict constitutionalist until it meant going against the document, which he did in Bush v Gore.   He, along with the four other right wing justices, voted in favor of allowing Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris’s previous certification of George Bush as the winner of the primary to stand, thus giving him the presidency.  This would lead to the deaths of thousand of Iraqis, as well as the severe erosion of civil rights, continued degradation of financial regulations, and ultimately the great financial collapse of 2007.

There are people in power of great intelligence who are amoral and inherently evil.  Scalia was one of these people and it is of utmost importance to this country that we replace him with someone with courage and moral integrity.  Appointing Justices is the most important thing a president does.  A vote for oompa-loompa Trump or batshit-crazy Ted Cruz is a vote for the further erosion of civil rights.