Welcome to the Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the telltale fluid.
It’s worth saying: no one needs to feel bad about feeling good that Dump got the virus he convinced 40% of the country was a hoax. He denied it existed, he denied it was serious, he came out with all kinds of back-of-comic-book remedies for it, and he rarely if ever wore a mask. He disbanded the pandemic response protocols and the team put in place during the Obama presidency, like a spiteful preschooler, because everything vaguely attributable to Obama must be erased.
As many have pointed out, it is objectively funny that this particular loudmouth got the virus. It’s, to coin a phrase, hilarious. Just like it would be funny if he went around insisting he was impervious to fire and then spontaneously combusted. Just like if he’d kept insisting he was an expert juggler and then finally got a chance to demonstrate his juggling ability at Carnegie Hall, and he chose to juggle a fish bowl with a fish in it, a chain saw, and a stick of dynamite, and right off the bat he sent the fish bowl crashing to the stage, then the chain saw cut off one of his arms, then the dynamite blew up his upper torse and head, like, that’s how funny it is that Donald Dump has the virus right now. And if he’s on a ventilator, so much the funnier, and if he’s in a coma, even funnier, and if he dies, hilarious.
Did you see the lame-ass speech he gave with no makeup on? He looked like Grampa Munster with a nest of yellow fiberglass insulation on his head. He looked like one of those baked-apple shrunken heads Vincent Price used to advertise on TV. Incidentally, here in the text is a link to a website that harks back to those apple shrunken heads and teaches you how to make them:
https://www.hgtv.com/design/make-and-celebrate/handmade/how-to-make-apple-shrunken- heads
Imagine being so insecure about how you stack up to a black man – and bear in mind no one else is actually comparing you to this black man, you’ve taken it upon yourself to set up this success contest, this battle of shallow achievement, literally inside your own sick mind – imagine setting up this contest – a contest which, even by your own shallow criteria, you are clearly losing – imagine having constructed such a giant public display of your own inadequacy and your own fear of that inadequacy, like a giant aquarium on display in Times Square with an enormous obese albino suckerfish in it, and your entire reputation is that fat, ugly, pink-gilled, pink-eyed albino suckerfish sucking up scum from the aquarium gravel. I say fat because, as much as I frown on body shaming, I think it’s fine to body-shame Trump. He’s ugly, fat, looks like his diaper is full of scrambled eggs, and his mouth is puckered like an Instagram slut. Also his wife’s a Transylvanian self-promoting sex-traffic refugee who failed her ESL classes, aged out of the trade, and thought that selling herself to the most crooked real estate clown in New York was a retirement plan. I know she’s Slovenian, but I like the association with vampires Transylvania conjures. “I dig grave for husband.” That meme cracks me up. Their lives are like an underground comic about the New York City shitterati scene.
According to about 37% of likely voters, Donald Trump is the paragon of whiteness. He’s the best a white man can be. Some think he’s the Messiah. What idiots. The Messiah is going to be black and Jewish, and chromosomally mostly female, so don’t waste your time on white male losers, of which Dump is literally the epitome. It’s almost like someone carved him out of a mound of dog turds and let it bleach in the sun until off-white.
When I talk about how stupid and evil white people are, I’m talking about those in that 37% and those throughout history who have pursued the insane imaginary destiny implied by that 37%’s thoughts, actions, and desires. I don’t mean, for example, Chuck, who’s got more mitigating strikes against his whiteness than a Proud Boy can shake a rainbow dildo at, and I sure as hell don’t mean me, being a Hebrew of swarthy essence, nor do I mean any other reasonably self- aware white person.
So why even say “white people,” or why not qualify it in order to soothe the easily bruised sensitivities of most of the decent caucasoidals in the nation? Because whiteness is the essence of the error of the Trump voter, it is the key to their arguments for oppression, even for their use of economic oppression against the non-white people and even the poor and working white people of the world. There are a lot of things wrong with whiteness as a critique of oppression, but there’s a lot useful in it, too, and it’s not going away anytime soon, either as a description or a status marker.
There’s an admittedly-white person who has come out against Trump recently, and he might be the palest accidentally near-progressive celebrity since David Bowie. He’s almost beyond pale. About a month ago, Jim Gaffigan, a clean-working, Catholic standup comic, let loose some profanity- and typo-laden tweets railing at Trump. I find Gaffigan very funny, albeit not particularly challenging. He’s the funniest ethnically and politically bland comic working today. After his twitter rant, though, people online began attacking, not just him, but his wife.
In response, his wife, Jeannie Gaffigan, wrote a piece called “My loved ones told me ‘real’ Catholics vote for Trump. Here’s my response.” It was posted in America, A Jesuit Review. I felt it wasn't getting the exposure it deserved. That is why I posted it on Facebook, to at least give it the small boost of which I was capable.
At least one self-described "fierce Papist" was able to engage with the post intelligently and positively. Another, though, seemed to be passive-aggressively concealing his knee-jerk disagreement with the piece, taking the stance that he didn’t know why anyone would post an article where the author flexes on another’s faith – whatever that means – especially when RBG had so recently died and this dominionist Catholic bitch had just been nominated. I think he actually wanted to come out and rage self-righteously against abortion, but knew that, on a post under the watchful gaze of a couple thousand of my friends, that was not going to be a winning move.
Jeannie Gaffigan condemned a single-issue Catholicism that privileges abortion above all the other injustices in our society. She learned to think in terms of justice in Jesuit school, justice as an expression of faith, and listed injustices to other vulnerable populations ignored by Trump- supporting Catholics. She had come to the conclusion, based on her faith, that outlawing abortion was a low priority compared to getting rid of a morally corrupt fascist in favor of a candidate who at least presented real opportunities to address some of the many injustices she’d listed. She gave a shout out to the current Pope, a Mr. Francis, who has denounced capitalism as immoral and destructive of human and other life.
Gaffigan never mentions capitalism by name, but she does talk about homelessness and police violence, neither of which would be possible without capitalism, and both of which are required by it.
We’ve had a religious left in the past in the US, and it seems to be coming back with a rush of anti-capitalist glory. Reverend William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign is walking in the footsteps of Dorothy Day, the famous Catholic anarchist of the last century. Fascists may have tried to crush the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America, but they failed to erase it from history. It too is having a resurgence.
The religious left is far more ecumenical than our Bible-thumping enemies on the right. Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Hindus fill out their ranks. The fascism of the Trump regime has made it all the clearer to them that capitalism does not serve the people and cannot be forced to without a struggle, and the ideal victory of that struggle must be capitalism’s demise. The next step in the struggle is to remove the fascist who would use paramilitaries to crush protest and discourage voting.
Obama didn’t run a particularly transparent presidency, he kept a lot of secrets, which made it difficult to keep tabs on his malfeasance, and that seems to be one of the few stylistic flourishes Dump has tried to retain. Sadly, for him, he has again failed where Obama succeeded. He alienates his underlings so much and so quickly, they can’t wait to leak all his dirty secrets to the press.
Trump suffers from unintended transparency. Even now, as he strives to conceal the degree of his illness, he’s incapable of it. He looks like he’s been sculpted from papier-mâche and phlegm, and his blustering speeches are obviously edited around his respiratory gasps. His self-serving delusions stand stripped bare before the nation, we can almost watch his organs become inflamed.
His narcissism is grotesque and obese. A survivor of a relationship with a narcissist recently told me that portrayals of narcissists on TV and in movies always fail to take it far enough. The one service Trump fulfills is to portray narcissism in its properly nightmarish and cartoonish extreme.
But there’s one movie I thought might give Trump a run for his money, and that is the recent remake of The Invisible Man starring Elizabeth Moss as a woman who tries to get out of an abusive relationship with a tech guru by punching and stabbing the air. It’s better than the Elizabeth Shue/Kevin Bacon version, Hollow Man. In that version Kevin Bacon kept getting water, gravy, and mustard on him, so he was almost never invisible. In this one it’s not that so much. Invisibility itself plays its part in the villain’s undoing, rather than his mere sloppiness with fluids.
I believe Trump will one day be invisible. He’s gone from white to off-white to transparent, and soon, no one will see him at all. That is the real treasure at the end of the monochromatic rainbow.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!