I wrote this November 2020 just after the general election. I’ve been incredibly busy with work and never got a chance to fully edit this down to a size I felt comfortable with. It’s been forever since I posted an entry so fuck it. Roll with me and this stream of consciousness article.

I’m happy that Donald Trump is on his way out. At least, at the moment, he’s being shown the door. Drunk on power after sitting at the bar for four years, it doesn’t look like he’s going to leave quietly and the bouncers might have to drag his messy ass out of the club. Some of us are hoping that systems of law that have shown people of color nary a passing glance of justice will force him to pay his tab. That this motherfucker sanctioned and executed a policy that separated breastfeeding infants from their parents, seeking protection from brutal conditions in their own countries, is short of grounds for conviction of crimes against humanity. And execution. To borrow from the late, great, Old Dirty Bastard, I wanna see blood, whether it’s period blood or bustin’ his fuckin’ face, some blood! That starts with Stephen Miller, the architect of the aforementioned policy that resulted in children being locked in cages and more than 500 of them unable to be reconnected with their families because the already inept government couldn’t be bothered to keep records to make that happen. It continues with Trump, for obvious reasons, and ends with anyone who facilitated this inhumane act. A plea of, “I was just following orders,” is just another reminder that state-sponsored acts of violence are acceptable, so long those acts are inflicted on people of color. This brings me to the title of this piece.

An easy-to-spot indicator of a country’s health is its level of income and social inequality. Historically, it doesn’t matter a country’s predominant nor minority racial makeup, nor majority religion, nor the geographic location of a country. Though each of these points can be an excuse for, or as a marker for how resources are unevenly divided, invariably the truth rolls up to a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. A chasm of wealth between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, and therefore the concentration of power lies in the hands of a few. Unchecked capitalism creates the conditions that one might characterize a shit hole country. Trust me, I know. My parents came to the United States from Haiti, the crown jewel in Trump’s crown of crow.

For those of you unfamiliar with Haiti’s long and complicated history. I’ll try to tell a condensed version. Haiti, originally called Ayiti by the Taíno, the island’s first inhabitants (called San Domingue by colonizers who systematically killed the indigenous population) was France’s richest slave colony. The French Revolution ended in 1793 with the creation of a new constitution and members of the monarchy being shortened by a head. The enslaved people in Ayiti looked at the hypocrisy of the liberation of the French proletariat with anger and disdain. This fertilized a slave revolt which ended in the the defeat of Napolean’s armies and in 1804, the birth of a young nation of formerly enslaved people. France (and by extension, the world), upset with its loss refused to recognize Haiti’s sovereignty unless they agreed to pay 150 million Francs -with a gun to its head because France had 12 warships ready to start bombarding the populace- and forced Haiti to discount exports to France by 50%. The debt was reduced to 90 million Francs (about $17B today) but the amount was more than 10 times the country’s revenues and the debt wasn’t paid off until 1947. So this fledgling Black nation began its history much like a black family living in a racist white neighborhood while paying the Ku Klu Klan protection money, which happened to be more than 10x the household’s income. How would you expect a family to invest in itself and prosper with such crushing debt? You can’t. Haiti struggled financially and had failed political leadership, which made repeated futile overtures to the racist US for decades. The Duvalier dictatorship whose father-son reign (Papa & Baby Doc) during the Cold War stole billions from the country’s coffers and fattened the bourgeoisie’s pockets while the US happily enabled them, because the Docs rejected communism. Twenty percent of the population hold 60% of the country’s wealth while 30% are food insecure. Haiti has absolutely no social safety net, a paltry state medicine system, less than 10% of the schools are state run. The highest income earners pay virtually no taxes. Partially because of economic policy, partially because the country literally doesn’t have the infrastructure to collect taxes. There are virtually no government mandated or enforced regulations so the local bourgeisie and multi-national (mostly American) companies exploit Haiti’s workers who barely make a living wage. Haiti, might very well be the textbook example of unchecked capitalism. Haitians, eager to escape this exploitative reality come to the United States for a better life, but end up being exploited for cheap labor, in the States. I call it the Capitalist Exploitation pipeline: developing countries are destabilized by US policy and they’re led to believe that their political and economic salvation will be found in America. Much of the Black and Brown nations of the world have slightly different histories but land in the same place. Trump calls them shithole countries but the analysis, which, especially after WWII should include the U.S.’s complicity, is never told.

The reality is that the United States has been a shithole country since day one. Exploitative labor practices? Check…. slavery anybody? Even poor white kids were exploited in factories until the 1930s. The Social Security Act of 1935 created a social safety net. The 5-day workweek. A Federal Minimum wage. All social programs and policies that benefit and protect working class people from exploitation. But today, corporations, powered by the tailwinds of Reagan-era deregulation and the erosion of a social safety net has led to a greater concentration of supply-side wealth. This disproportionately affects people of color, but poor whites are not immune. The difference is that they’re sold a cocktail of lies by the US elites. unwilling to stop being drunk on power. They’re told that black and brown people are dangerous and will kill them, and are stealing their jobs. They’re told that government regulations which are meant to assist and protect them are “socialism” and inexplicably, because the Red Scare is an effective relic of the Cold War, it works. I can’t overstate how absolutely astonished I am by this. Motherfuckers wanna talk about ‘paying it forward’ but are afraid of socialism. So while the creep of unchecked capitalism is actively destroying the middle class and created a chasm of wealth disparity in the United States that rivals developing nations, a good portion of the population actively supports their own exploitation. It’s not without a large bite of irony that when Trump lost the election, his cult-followers threatened to leave the country for a friendlier political climes.

But with Trump and his supporters, their ability to vote against their own interests is only part of the story. The far right are predisposed to cruelty and selfishness. I think about a Trump bumper stick I saw a couple of months ago in Pennsylvania that read, “Trump 2020 – Because Fuck You Again.” That bumper sticker is telling that because Trump really has not done much to help the “{insert Trump loving noun} to own the libs” crowd. Trump doesn’t like them; it’s documented that he actually has a naked disdain for him. And they don’t actually love this country. They only collectively love the mythology of this country and the way country has historically favored them within that mythos. E.g., Manifest Destiny and America’s draw to the Westerns film genre in the 20th century.
If they loved this country they would respect all Americans. The fact that they love that he directs hate at ethnic groups, except when it suits him politically -and he only loves them in word, not in deed- and that he “fights for them”. It’s the poison of the aggrieved.

White people hate this country because they know the following point to be self-evident. Even if you lived in a country where despite the fact that you’re not one of the folks in bondage, but the fact that its founding document declared that all men were created equal, but a subset of those men were in bondage, the balance in that equation is tenuous, at best. On a certain level, they have to know that because some men are in bondage, that they can themselves one day find themselves in bondage. It’s the reason that a. they fear the eventual retribution of their system of racism, and with that, b. the tables could be turned on them and they end up in bondage. And those two facts hold the other in orbit. The average Trump supporter hates this country because despite the fact that the history of this country started with them existing at an advantage to black and brown people, their vision of an American nirvana – aka The American Dream was never realized. And because of the progress of black and brown people, who have, on a large scale, advanced ahead of them, they hold resentment to those people and the country that allowed it to happen. This is the basis of Making America Great Again. With people of color in positions of power, they feel like their very fears are being realized. The mythological promise of the American Dream is being dashed by the other. The intimating of a race war comes from that class of people because they fear that people of color will physically harm them for the sin of American slavery. So, they strike first. The politicians redraw district maps to gerrymander wide swaths of voting blocs. They will destroy this country and support the occupant of the white house who refuses to participate in what is the cornerstone of American democracy. The peaceful transfer of power. They would rather act as a junta to stage a coup for him to stay in power, than to ascribe to probably the sole piece of American tradition, that makes it a functioning democracy. Would anyone who really loves their country actively support its destruction? The answer is an absolute, no. For all of the rancor that shot from their ranks at black athletes kneeling as an act to protest police brutality, they’ve pivoted and morphed into an AR-15 emptying a full clip into America’s heart.

The ironic counter-point to that is the large numbers of people of color who love this country, despite their place within its caste system.

That is slowly being eroded. It’s like a kid who had a park all to himself and as soon as other kids started to come in an enjoying the park, The fact that anything socialist rubs them the wrong way tells you that it’s a culture of greed and selfishness that they’ve either been brainwashed to loathe, or they really couldn’t give a shit about anyone who doesn’t look like them or ascribe to their set of values.
The level of detachment from humanity it takes to be ok with children being separated from their parents at the border, and those kids being mistreated in prison cells.  
The religious right is not pro-life. They’re pro-The religious right is not about preserving freedoms. 
Anyone. Any American, especially white people, who could live with a bit of cognitive dissonance that the very country they love and whose founding fathers they mythologize, that the from the very first day, despite the preamble of the Constinution stating that all men are created equal, yet black people were living an existence that was criminally at odds with that statement. The hypocrisy should scare even those who’ve benefited from white privelege because a system that held two disparate thoughts, they, themselves could be pushed under the thumb of enslavement.
The difference between what is moral and what is legal is a distinction that has been debated for millenia, but when the immoral make the laws, the constituents are fucked.
From his ability to pay $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017 to the racism, to the inability of the other branches of government to stop him, Trump has laid bare, the vulnerabilities of political norms and inequities built into US laws.

The United States does not need to make concessions to the political right. The United States needs a very public reckoning of historically misplaced justice. Anything short of a criminal trial and the conviction and imprisonment of former President Donald Trump will be a failure in justice. And we would have learned absolutely nothing. The political right should not be absolved of its complete capitulation to the blaring and dangerous politics of white grievance. The party flirted with the ideology, with dog whistles for years. But Trump, not known for anything resembling subtlety, hauled in a sound system designed to deafen a stadium crowd and yelled the quiet parts out loud, including racial epithets. Without putting all the nails in the Trump coffin, and a systemic and sweeping response to racial and socio-economic disparity, including a re-realization of the American identity, another Trump will rise, and we might not be so lucky that he (or she) is as dimwitted as The Donald.