Trump made me sick long before COVID-19
There’s a random quote from Tomi Adeyemi’s novel Children of Virtue and Vengeance where the main character describes what’s she’s feeling in that moment:
“My stomach throbs with a pain so sharp I have to lean against the wall.”
This may be a line from Children of Virtue and Vengeance but I feel it’s a common sentiment regarding the state of the nation as a whole right now and particularly with the impeachment hearings (and yes I know I just got done talking about how you said you’re up to your eyebrows in impeachment hearings). But let me rephrase that — I feel that at least half the nation may feel that, but I seriously have to wonder about the other half.
The fact of the matter is, is that it doesn’t take a generous rounding error at all to say that half of the nation did indeed vote for Trump and still be accurate. And it makes me wonder about what’s going on here. To at least paraphrase Steve Shives, if the Democratic Party wanted to attract the “Republican vote” they can campaign on a platform of enslaving Black America again and they would still lose to the Republicans — because the Republican Party has now strongly identified with a certain mindset, a certain zeitgeist, a certain attitude that has had strong roots in this country, and the reality we may have to face is that this in fact has been growing.
There’s a rise of this right-wing, strongly nationalistic sentiment globally and it’s timing is simply quite distressing. There is of course Russia and China and Brexit. And talks of a Frexit, although the French are already so iconoclast even the foremost foreign political minds and, yes, the French themselves are more than a bit confused as to what the hell “Frexit” would even be. And there’s even the Canadian question of “Quexit,” although rather than those weird Québécois, apparently it’s Western Canada that wants to separate. But to be brutally honest here right now, if you were to take an observer from say 1935 and transport them to now, I’d be shocked if that observer didn’t conclude that history would say that Hitler had the right idea after all. I am looking at the current global political landscape and I have to wonder myself, did the Allies really did win WWII? Or rather, how did the Allies turn into Nazi Germany-lite? What is it that has driven such right-wing nationalism seemingly out of the blue in as little as three or even two short years?
For Russia, it’s been almost 30 years coming. What most people don’t realize is that the de-communization of Russia was accompanied by a very violent but extremely brief coup — one that saw Russian tanks fire on their own parliament and the rise of the Army general that gave that order, a man we now remember as a great peacemaker and leader of the Russian people, Boris Yeltsin. A man who Russia remembers as a great traitor who handed his country to the Americans, perhaps not unlike how many see Trump now with his cozy relationship to that very same country — or how Trump’s supporters feel about Obama and Clinton virtually surrendering America’s position on the global stage to China. Either way, the Russian people saw Yeltsin as weak, as an opportunist who was less interested in even grabbing power for himself as he was just living the easy life courtesy the West. For whatever bad Putin brings, for whatever power he gobbles up for himself, at least he brings Russia along with it. And then there’s China — I’m not entirely clear how Xing Xha Ping even arose to power, except that history and political science shows that in communist politburos, there always somehow tends to be a path for the especially power-hungry to rise up to the top. We’ve seen this in Fidel, in Pol Pot, and China itself certainly has no shortage of this legacy with Chairman Mao.
