Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
In a dreamlike if not nightmarish image, a Croatian war criminal, during his sentencing at The Hague, killed himself by drinking a little bottle of poison. The US Senate passed a tax "deform" bill designed to injure if not destroy a majority of citizens while giving a tax break to private jet owners. And to twist the blade in our angst, President Hemorrhoid Hoover tweeted a trilogy of the British right wing's Islamophobic version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Each day brings a new travesty. That's the hallmark of the Donald Dump era. There are certainly more important issues to focus on than the daily atrocity he commits against logic and language. But it's all right, sometimes, to examine the daily dung and our consequent feelings of disgust. It can be instructive. It can even bring us together. As a people. A people disgusted.
I don't always wake up late, but even when I mistakenly wake up early, it takes me a while to catch up with the rest of you. Depression and apathy, aggravated by the itchy burning of President Hemorrhoid, weighs me down. Upon waking, I find that my head is encased in a gelatinous cube of despair. On the very rare mornings I start perusing social media especially early, at, say, 5 am, nothing actually registers for the first few hours. I'm like a mature sunflower, head in the shadows, seeds falling out of my heavy face, absorbing nothing. Well, maybe not seeds falling out of my face. Unless they're seeds of incomprehension. But incomprehension isn't a seed-bearing plant. It's a legume. And why out of my face? Why "out" at all?
Leave me alone, it's early.
Living in the Pacific time zone, I get going, if you can call it "going," three hours later than the folks on the East Coast, so they're even farther ahead of me than my fellow Pacific Rimmers. Simply put, in the continental USA, I'm not going to be catching any early worms. By the time I finally come out of the fog and realize I'm on Twitter or Facebook, every news item is long buried under several layers of mockery, parody, and meme-age. But I've become pretty good at digging through the bemusement and bile of others to the inciting incident.
I'm concerned that white people didn't quite get what happened when the Navajo Code Talkers visited Resident Dump in the White Witch Satanic Christmas House. Not that the situation had been parodied to death, but it had quickly accumulated a thick carpet of condemning articles and tweets by the time most of us got to it. So some might be wondering, "Did Dump call one of the Code Talkers 'Pocahontas?' Did he confuse one of the Code Talkers for Elizabeth Warren? Did he mention how he touched himself while watching the cartoon? What exactly went on? I really don't care enough to find out, because I'm used to Dump constantly being what Mel Gibson becomes under the influence of alcohol, but without the alcohol or the charm."
But really, if he was making fun of Elizabeth Warren, what was harm? She did claim to be a Native American on her application to Harvard, or on her application for financial aid, or on her job application for a law firm or to waitress at TGI Fridays or something, didn't she? No, she didn't, but that doesn't matter anyway. Elizabeth Warren didn't insult the Code Talkers to their faces, Dump did.
To be fair – there's no reason not to be fair – here's the best spin you could put on the incident: Donald Dump met these Navajo Code Talkers. And he thought, What do I have in common with these Navajos, how can I connect with them on a personal level, do I have a Native American friend I can refer to? No? How about an enemy? Oh, right, there's that Pocahontas woman, I'll talk about her, they'll appreciate that! Hey, you original Americans, there's someone else who, like you, claims to go back very long in heritage on the land, or something. They call her Pocahontas.
Actually, Dump calls her Pocahontas, and the only others who might are Dump's fans, aping him. But, let's let that minor inaccuracy slide, because this is Dump, and he's a special-needs president. And pointing out all his inaccuracies would require an eternity.
Now, some white people still don't get why that was racist. I mean, Elizabeth Warren gets mocked by people of color for claiming Native heritage, why shouldn't Dump do it? Isn't he on the side of the people of color in this instance? Don't they agree that it's ridiculous for Warren to claim Cherokee ancestry?
That's an interesting point, really. What he was doing was pointing out a white person's foible to the people he thought would appreciate it most. And isn't he correct? Shouldn't they have doubled over in hilarity?
I'm not even sure they were paying attention to him, but I know the Navajo Nation and a lot of other First Nations people later put out a statement that they weren't happy with the Pocahontas remark. They said the name was being used as a punchline. It was being used as an insult.
Consider this. Let's say Dump was honoring Scotsmen. He's dedicating a monument to Fatty Arbuckle, a Scottish American hero. And he says to the assembled Scottish American crowd, "Hey, I have a friend who is very tightfisted with money, just like you guys. We call him Scrooge McDuck."
Or maybe this example will work for you. Let's say Dump is honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, the black WWII military heroes, and, to establish common ground, you know, because he's such a people-pleaser, he says to them, "Oh, guys, you're black, so you'll love this. I have a friend who's always trying to get super tan. I call him Uncle Remus."
If that doesn't demonstrate to you why First Nations people would take offense at Dump's Pocahontas crack, I've got news for you. You're racist. In a big way.
There's a reason these examples are Disney-dependent, incidentally. If Disney had done a cartoon of Oliver Twist, I could make up an example about Jews and Fagen. And it's only a matter of time, I assume. Becoming a Disney character gives one's name an instantly established pedigree in the entertainment business. And business is nothing if not respectable.
At least that's the viewpoint of Eric Dump, one of President Hemorrhoid's ugly Dumplings, who claimed not to get what all the fuss was about. He tweeted that, since Disney made so much money on their Pocahontas movie, there was no way her name could be offensive.
Disney's receipts having anything to do with whether Eric Dump's father is an offensive semi-simian, in any and every circumstance, is a connection only a Dump could make. And, Dumplike, Eric made it.
A lot of the time, how an incident or statement comes to be offensive to a group on social media can be difficult for those outside the group to parse. And it's a truism that the greater one's distance from identification with an offended group, the less sympathy one is likely to have. In the case of Dump, however, it's a safe bet that any offense taken to, say, his existence, or any aspect thereof, by any human being, animal, plant, fungus or crystalline structure, is one-hundred-percent legitimate, and we should all just agree in advance, right now, to be sympathetically nauseated.
Yes, daily we all cry out, "When will it end?" Not till the peeing Slavic ladies sing, it seems. How will it end? It will end the way all horror stories end: in dissatisfaction.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!