Hispanic Fanatic

If you are a progressive, you’ve likely had some variation of the following conversation:

“Global warming is real.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why was it so cold last Christmas?”

“Um, there’s a fundamental difference between climate and weather. Furthermore, your personal experience is—”

“Snow! There was lots of snow!”

“To hell with it. I’m just going to shoot both of us.”

Yes, all conservatives had to do to undermine the concept of global warming was to latch upon the word “warm,” and then demand that liberals explain how winter still existed. And in politics — as in business, love, and comedy — if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

We see this in other progressive concepts. We say, “white privilege,” and an irate white man launches into a diatribe about how he grew up poor and he never got a handout and who are you calling privileged anyway So then the liberal stumbles around trying to explain what “privilege” means and how it exists even if you don’t see it and so on and so on until the angry white man stomps off, more pissed off than ever that some tree-hugger implied that he had it easy.

And of course, even mentioning Black Lives Matter unleashes a furious retort of “all lives matter!” Once again liberals respond by employing metaphors and memes to explain what should be a pretty basic fucking idea (i.e., it’s not good for a society to murder black people at will).

It’s in this spirit of pointing out the poor marketing decisions of the left that I bring up the latest disastrous political catchphrase:

Defund the police.

This is quite possible the worst slogan for a good idea ever.

You see, when presenting proposals on how to reform law enforcement in this country, and end the militarization of our police departments, all while preserving the safety of our nation’s residents, it is not helpful to spend all our time saying, “No, don’t worry, someone will still respond if a man with a gun is breaking into your house.”

But that’s exactly what we are doing.

This should be a time for discussing new techniques, like that Scottish de-escalation method that’s catching on. Or we should be talking about the fundamental role of cops in America. Or we should be debating what public safety actually looks like. All of these ideas have public support.

Instead, right-wingers are sending out tweets and status updates that more or less consist of “Liberals want to allow criminals to run rampant over you.”

And then progressives get all defensive, like we always do, and explain that the phrase we’ve chosen does not actually mean what it appears to mean, like we always do.

And if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Hey, I recently received an angry email from a reader who shrieked how terrifying it is that Minneapolis wants to abolish its police department. And indeed, it sounds scary — like our cities are going to descend into The Purge. 

Or maybe it will be like that scene in RoboCop where the police abandon the city, and the bad guys start setting off rocket launchers (bonus points if you read that sentence and shouted, “I like it!” and made an explosion sound).

In any case, this guy did not want to even hear about defunding the police, let alone abolishing them. Much of this, of course, can be chalked up to willful ignorance or woeful stupidity. But there are many jittery moderates who can be persuaded by simplistic answers to complex issues. And there are determined reactionaries who know they can suck all the oxygen out of the room by forcing progressives to defend “crazy” ideas and explain nuances and tiptoe around details.

Speaking of conservatives, give them credit where it is due. This is a crowd that knows how to sell shit. For example, they convinced Americans that they wanted a war in Iraq but that they didn’t want health care. They persuade poor Americans, year after year, that objecting to wealth inequality is “class warfare.” And they have weaponized the most inoffensive, effective way to combat coronavirus — wearing a damn mask — and turned it into a battle for “freedom.”

Conservatives know the power of symbolism and straightforward mottos. For example, they have claimed both the American flag and the Christian cross, and all the powerful emotions that they invoke, while liberals have basically said, “Sure, go ahead and take them,” thereby guaranteeing that both “faith” and “patriotism” get turned into clear, concise virtues that only Republicans could possibly ever have.

Meanwhile, progressives are the “mob” and “snowflakes” and Antifa fanatics.

Those labels don’t track well, as the marketing experts would say.

What’s the solution? Well, if I knew anything about branding, I would have sold nine million books by now and be riding out this pandemic in my New Zealand compound. So I don’t know the answer. I do know, however, that progressives have a problem. And feeling proud of ourselves for shouting, “Defund the police” is not a smooth path forward.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go explain to some conservatives that taking a knee during the National Anthem is not insulting the flag per se, but an indictment of a racist system that… never mind, I’ve already lost them.

In the last week, America has endured even more protests (often marred by aggressive cops and/or right-wing lunatics), a surge in Covid-19, and allegations that the president is so corrupt that the House articles of impeachment were penny ante compared to his actual malfeasance.

On a personal note, I’m exhausted from overwork, an old friend abruptly begin spewing Soros conspiracy nonsense, and I think I’m catching a cold.

Yes, there was a major victory for LGBTQ rights, and a narrow win for the Dreamers. So that’s ending the week on a high note. But let’s not push it.

Yeah, I’m taking a break. 

I will be back next week with (hopefully) more astute and coherent points to make.

Until then, I will leave you with this quirky factoid:

A couple of weeks ago, Irene Triplett died at the age of 90 in a North Carolina nursing home. Her father was teenage soldier in the Civil War, and as his only surviving child, Ms. Triplett was the last person to receive a pension from a veteran’s Civil War service.

Every month, the Veterans Administration paid Irene Triplett $73.13. By the time of her death, the family had been collecting the pension for 155 years. One has to wonder about the VA employee tasked with cutting Ms. Triplett’s check each month. He now has a little more free time.

In any case, Irene Triplett was the last living link to the Civil War. Her demise is ironic, considering that it comes at a time when all of us are primed to become living links to the Second Civil War.

So there’s that to consider.

See you next week.

And then everybody made the exact same joke at the same time.

You see, the timing was too good, the irony too evident, and the metaphor too glaring for us to help ourselves.

So that’s why half of Facebook, most of Twitter, and all of the headline writers in America shouted the following:

“Trump finally got his wall. But it’s at the White House!”

And then we all laughed, or at least chuckled as much as we could while coughing up tear gas or choking down existential angst.

Yes, the president who is so popular with his nation’s citizens that he has to hide in the basement now has a riot fence to protect him from America. As many have pointed out, only despots ruling over troubled lands construct barriers to keep the populace at bay. A wall around the presidential residence is what “authoritarian rulers in third-world countries build to protect themselves from the passions of their own aggrieved people, and a far cry from the ‘people’s house’ that has for centuries symbolized a president accountable to the citizens who elected him.”

Furthermore, “as Trump tries to project strength, he instead appears weaker than ever.” After all, Mr. Law and Order can “bluster about force and domination” but the new multilayered black fencing “around the executive mansion reveals the reality that he is operating not from strength but from fear.”

Seriously, can you imagine anything that petrifies Trump more than thousands of black people massed outside his bedroom window? The only way it would be scarier for him is if they all waved around copies of his tax returns.

To add insult to — well, insult — those protesters who terrify the president so much are now marching right up to White House wall and plastering it with Black Lives Matter slogans. So the administration has given the demonstrators an even bigger platform.

With such a heavy-handed symbol of Trump’s ineptitude and cowardice encircling the White House, it’s a good time to ask, “Hey, whatever happened to the origina l wall?” 

You know, the one that Mexico was going to pay for? The Trump campaign’s chief selling point to xenophobes? The central promise of his presidency that inspired racists to taunt Latino kids with chants of “Build the wall! Build the wall!” Yeah, that one.

Well, I’m glad you asked.

It turns out that the administration’s goal of blocking Latin America behind 2,000 miles of towering concrete has fallen just a little short.

The Customs and Border Protection has acknowledged that a mere 194 miles of border barriers has been constructed since Trump took office. Furthermore, 191 of those miles “already had barriers in place.” This means that the president has placed fresh obstacles on a grand total of three miles of borderland. Once again, the number of miles with new barriers is… three.

You can walk that distance in an hour or so. It amounts to less than a mile per year that Trump has been in office.

This is even more pathetic when you consider that the president has pulled billions of dollars from other military projects, and engaged in blatant cronyism while doing it.

Of course, it’s not just about length (ahem). It’s about strength.

Which makes it all the more laughable — or tragic, who can tell the difference anymore — that the new barriers have been easily climbed, hacked through, carted off, and toppled over by heavy breezes.

Yes, the president “wants Americans to believe he’s built hundreds of miles of impenetrable wall that cannot be climbed.” But in truth, his half-assed engineering project is “not a wall; it’s not hundreds of miles; it can be climbed; it’s penetrable, and in one instance, it failed to withstand wind gusts.”

And it bears repeating that “Mexico isn’t paying for any of it, the Republican’s campaign promises notwithstanding.”

At this point, let me remind everyone that I repeatedly said, back in 2016, that there would never be a huge wall on the Mexican border, and to think otherwise was just racist, delusional nonsense.

I should have bet money on that statement.

So maybe the wall around the White House is as good as it gets for our beleaguered, doltish commander in chief. Yes, it’s true that “apresident who needs to take shelter behind fences and barriers because he feels threatened by his own citizens is not their leader.” More accurately, “he is their prisoner.”

But give the guy a break. It’s the closest he’s come to fulfilling a campaign promise, and it won’t matter to his dead-eyed worshippers anyway

No matter what, they will all keep chanting to “Build the wall! Build that wall!” — in denial to the very end.

If you could time travel back to 2016 and issue dire warnings about the Trump Administration, as soon as you mentioned the president tear-gassing peaceful protesters in order to engineer a photo op in front of a church while waving a bible around… well, your listeners would dismiss you as a deranged liberal spewing heavy-handed metaphors that defy belief.

And yet, here we are, in the clutches of a fascist Snidely Whiplash who is so comically corrupt, idiotically inept, and grotesquely authoritarian that he’s morphed into a human parody. Except nobody is laughing.

There is some comfort, however, in the fact that American society has deteriorated so far and so quickly that subtlety, subtext, and irony have all been trampled under the leaden heels of conservative fear-mongering and white nationalism. And that sliver of a silver lining is this:

We all know exactly where we stand.

There is no more justifying tortured syntaxes, misogynistic insults, or racist asides with mutterings of “What the president really meant to say is…”

There is no more dismissing neo-Nazis on parade as potentially good people in disguise, or claiming that the GOP is going along with high-caliber insanity in exchange for tax cuts.

There is no more shadowboxing the truth, rationalizing praise for dictators, or dismissing the fetishization of violence.

There is not a conservative or a liberal who is confused about this president. 

You say that Trump wants to censor social media — a blatant kneecapping of free speech — solely because Twitter fact-checked one of countless lies? That sounds about right.

You say the president has “mused” (now there’s a quaint word!) about unleashing American military might on American citizens on American soil? Not a shocker.

Similarly, we cannot be too taken aback at the state of this country, and the morass of shameless, vile behavior that erupts forth every day.

So there’s a white woman in Central Park who calls the cops on a black man, knowing full well he could be killed because of her false accusation, because he dared to ask her to follow the rules? Yes, we could have predicted that.

And a homicidal cop in Minneapolis kneeled on a black man’s neck for several minutes, for no reason other than to inflict critical physical pain, without even the slightest concern that people were watching and videotaping for minutes on end? Hey, the only surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.

And you shout that we now have nationwide — and even worldwide — protests against America’s systemic racism that have turned hundreds of city streets into rolling street battles? Honestly, who couldn’t have seen that one coming?

Yes, perhaps there is yet one sad, stupendously delusional Trump fan who is muttering, mostly to himself, that our jabbering chief executive is not as power-hungry as he seems to be, and that our nation is actually on the right track. 

Well, I’m sorry, my friend, but when it comes to this president and this country, plausible deniability died long ago, brutality and decisively. Its essence was cremated, and then the ashes were scattered over cages holding migrant children. 

The benefit of the doubt has been executed, and conservative “principles” have been revealed as the pathetic façade they always were. 

Those moderate Republicans who still believe Trump will magically become a unifying leader? They are as real as Bigfoot. 

And journalists who still believe that Trump won the votes of rural whites because of “economic anxiety”? They are some strange fairy tale or a half-forgotten urban myth.

Nobody truly believes any of those absurd ideas anymore.

Instead, we believe in the undeniable, the clear-cut and the perfectly obvious. We believe in rage and malicious motives and unquenchable greed. We believe in irrational fear and shrieking and the banging of heads against walls. We believe in those things because we see them every day.

It’s all out in the open now. 

African Americans are sick of being targets. Progressives are tired of being polite. And racists aren’t even hiding it anymore. Everyone knows where one another stands.

And everyone is poised.