[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]W[/dropcap]hy do you hate your country?
It’s a question any imaginative thinker critical to the USA will face, if they happen to come from there.
My country? My hate? As if the phenomenon emanated from me. As if I simply conjured the hate from empty air.
The hatred arrived with the genocidal settler colonialists who not only built a sham republic upon the backs of slaves but perpetrated the worst act of genocide in the blood-sodden history of humankind upon the indigenous people of the lands they named the Americas.
Moreover, the US is the largest force of evil on the planet, its armies and agents of subversion and espionage have left mountains of corpses worldwide while sustaining its imperial rule. The US has slaughtered four million innocent people of the Islamic faith since 1990 alone.
Also, the xenophobic hate did not find its alpha and omega point with the arrival on the scene of the strutting, preening tangerine-tinged Ass-Rocket In Chief. He is a mirror — not maestro — of the nation’s innate malevolence. He simply offends the optics of the liberal class.
Such a crass thing it is: to conduct the ugly business of capitalist economic despotism and global imperium by caprice and out in the open — rather than business as usual (i.e., behind closed doors, and by Deep State elitist and oligarch-purchased consensus). Damned tacky, that.
Trump should consult the resentful ghost of Richard Nixon on what a dangerous gambit it is to offend both the agendas of Deep State elites and the aesthetic sense of liberals.
Be my guest. March. Protest. Shake your righteous fist in the air. Even the cops have been instructed to give you wide latitude. (What does that detail reveal? – For the slow on the uptake, the powers that be have your back.) As for myself, I’ll attempt to abstain from denigrating your safe and superfluous actions.
I understand: Participation mystique is intoxicating; being in the midst of a self-reenforcing mass of one’s fellow land mammals jacks one’s adrenaline and induces one to fall into a swoon of self-love.
All and all, I think it is kinda cute and endearing. And it goes without saying, it is far preferable to the acts of genocide and imperialist blood letting from which we have arrived at this moment. Although, do not forget the here and now was created by the still here and the lingering ghosts of then.
Trump was borne on the denial-reeking winds of US history but he is not, to state what should be obvious, the creator of the hideous circumstance.
Image by Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
