Wildwood means a lot to me. I've lived down here longer than I've lived anywhere else in my life, which includes San Francisco, New York City and of course Philadelphia. I made a documentary about the Wildwood Boardwalk that was shown on PBS and I must have logged tens of thousands of miles walking that Boardwalk. It is tonic to my life.
It is called Wildwood By The Sea, a bucolic name for what is actually still a honky-tonk haven. My grandfather built his own cottage in Seaside Heights and I spent many summers there and those honky-tonk memories are still stirred by Wildwood, despite the recent efforts at gentrification, which consisted mostly of a boom in regimented white townhouses. Ug-lee. But when you scratch that veneer, there are still honky-tonk angels in the air.
A traitorous, duplicitous ex-dentist is defiling my honky-tonk paradise by bringing Donald J. Trump to the Wildwoods Convention Center on January 28th. Looking back, I see now that Jeff Van Drew has been perpetually on the make his whole political career. He never missed a chance to get his mug in the papers or on TV. He'd show up at a dogfight if there was a camera there.
He won re-election as a Democratic congressman and then switched parties, declaring “undying loyalty” to Trump in exchange for favors like Trump's Wildwood appearance, which he thinks will get him re-elected. That might be a long shot because a lot of people who voted for him are extremely pissed off at his flipping and some are even asking for their campaign contributions back. Fat fucking chance with a little creep turd like this. Doc Holiday was a better dentist and a more honest man.
When I heard that Trump was coming, my first impulse was to use my contacts to get either a ticket or press credentials for the Trump rally. Both the ex-mayor and the new mayor have been friendly over the years. The night the Boardwalk movie was shown on Channel 12, Ernie Troiano, then the mayor, actually called me to offer congratulations. He helped with the funding for a sequel, that sadly didn't go anywhere. I'm on good terms with Pete Byron, the new mayor, and the people at the Convention Center, so I probably had a shot at getting into the rally.
But the more I thought about it, the more I saw that there would be too much sadness for me – sadness to see my honky-tonk angel's wings dirtied by the scum that is Donald Trump. A guy wrote a book called “Everything That Trump Touches Dies” and I feared that Trump just being on this five-mile island would defile it for me for too long. Better not to be near it.
And an equal sadness for me is that I knew that if I went to the Trump rally, I would see people there that I know and like. This is Trump country, plain and simple. Before the presidential election, the town and much of Cape May County were chockablock with Trump lawn signs and banners.
I knew that I would be both saddened and angered, sad that these people have fallen for the crazed ragtime that spews from Trump's ugly sewer mouth and angered that Jeff Van Drew has sold out the people who voted for him.
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