Cortege

They walked quietly through the saddened streets of Squirrel Park, protesting the presence of the president who is supposed to protect us. Their dignity, gravitas, and sorrow were in marked contrast to the uninvited so-called first family who had ignored requests to let Pittsburgh bury its dead without using the tragic occasion as what was, in essence, just another campaign stop on Donald Trump's Red Meat Express.

The worst has happened; Donald Trump's ceaseless lying and provocation has led directly to the slaughter of innocents and innocence. America has become a seemingly lost nation.

Yet these protests, which were more of a funeral cortege than the loud, insistent protests that have greeted Trump's other atrocities, showed that there is still grace and empathy in the land. 

Yet grace and empathy are not in the Trump DNA and the Red Meat Express careens on, a string of robot rallies where Trump can strut and preen like a malevolent peacock and lie like a cheap rug while his base drools like some mad Pavlovian dog.

Trump thinks that he and he alone can bring victory to his sorry minions. That he and he alone can make America the last refuge and bastion of white supremacy. He proudly calls himself a nationalist, reveling in the historic connotations of the word as the calling card of Nazis and the fascist forces that have so long threatened the peace and security of the world.

The murder of a journalist who lived and worked here was seen by Trump as little more than an obstacle to the Saudi arms deal that Trump said would bring a million jobs to America when the reality would be little more than a few thousand.

The “bomb stuff” which he decried mainly as a distraction from his campaign efforts was a muddled attempt by another Trump-inspired madman to assassinate 14 prominent Americans whom Trump had identified as his mortal enemies. 

Yet he bears no responsibility. His folded arms default position is that whatever evil and madness are afoot in this country are the fault of the media, his whipping boy and Trump-annointed “enemy of the people.” 

He is a fucking pig.

And a pig with power. Not the raw physical power of a Hitler or Mussolini, but a worse, insidious power that was key to his 2016 victory and has been the megaphone for his delirium. 

  

No other president has used the so-called “social media” – Twitter – with the viciousness and relentlessness of Donald Trump. Obama used it wisely and discreetly and successfully during his campaign and presidency, but Trump is its master. He can reach untold millions in the middle of the night with a touch of his stunted thumbs. He can pump his venom out to America on the slightest whim. We have never seen such power.

Yet there is another power in America with the force to join the marchers in Pittsburgh in their protest of this incipient fascism.

That power is yours next Tuesday. Use it.