By Sid Schwab
Kicking off a multi-million-dollar campaign to sell their cheaply-bought, self-enriching, middle-class deceiving, poor-people-harming tax cuts, it’s fitting that the Koch brothers began with an ad featuring a young girl thanking Trump for “allowing” her to say Merry Christmas again.
In the alt-universe, the apparitional war on Christmas remains a favorite manipulation, perfectly illuminating their (the Kochs’, Trump’s, McConnell’s, Ryan’s, Hannity’s, et kleptera) confidence in their ability to distract bedazzled voters from their rapacious, destructive agenda.
Allowing! Well, clutch my pearls and call me Sarah! Because until Trump, borne to us on wings of angels, beleaguered Christian-Americans had been prohibited — under penalty of (?) — from saying those sanctified words, even amongst themselves, evidently. Kenyan brain implants. Inserted as you watched Fox “news,” neuro-receptors ironically impervious to disturbances.
Confident that the programmed will continue to buy the fiction of attacks on Christmas and other imaginary horrors, Republicans are relentlessly undoing environmental protections, blessing the poisoning of ourselves and our children. As they deploy voter suppression laws across the land, as they remain silent about (or, improbably, ignorant of) the effluvium of lies coming daily from Trump, they distract the distractible, via a phony “war.” (For those who believe the lie that Obama eschewed the words, it’s disproved in two seconds of Googling.)
Allowing! Believe it! For, whilst you turn your gaze to heaven, R’s have more regulations to extinguish. Like ones penalizing nursing homes for lousy care. Which they just did. Say it loud: Merry Christmas! (Not you, Grandma. Hands off the call button!)
Allowing! All praise be to Trump, giver of those things which He hath not yet taken away. How sweet the sound, how long the silence.
In this, the most believer-dense democracy on earth (teetering, but not yet pushed over the cliff), wherein Christianity is sprinkled on laws like ash from fires ravaging parched land, and where prayers in the Cabinet Room are led by a neurosurgeon-cum-housing expert giving thanks to God and Trump (not necessarily in that order) for erasing budget deficits after the signing of a bill increasing them: people will weep in agreement, thank Dear Leader for allowing them, once again, to mouth those forbidden, commercialized words. (Not fake news: during Barack Obama’s presidency, when an actual president was tweeting “Merry Christmas,” Trump tweeted “Happy Holidays.” You can look it up.)
Around that Cabinet Room sang they their hosannas and genuflected them their knees. (Only missing were 50-foot posters and a stiff-armed and -legged military parade.) And He smiled upon them. (More of a smirk, really, but it warmed in them that which had replaced their souls.)
So cocksure of his deceptions is Trump that he hied himself to Mired-in-Loco immediately post-signature to announce to his pals, “You all just got a lot richer.” Fast flew he, outracing his biggest lie of all, that the bill was about helping the middle class, that he and his buddies would suffer. So anxious he was to reap his millions, he signed the bill this year, allowing its effects to commence in 2018 instead of 2019; those who care to look may feel the hurt in time for the next election. Oops. (“Oops” assumes cultists will find their way out of their thrall, to search beyond the promises. Shall one hope?)
The thing about predictions concerning what I and nearly all analyses consider a regressive, budget-busting, Koch/Trump/Corker-enriching, capitalism-threatening tax bill is that at some point we’ll learn who’s right. If I’m wrong, I’ll admit it, loud and clear. Will Trumpists, if it’s they? It would require unprecedented rejection of claims of fakery, but there’s a first time for everything. So, while we await the reckoning, let’s take a moment: The year is almost new, a time for resolutions and resolve.
Here’s mine: knowing the unlikeliness of puncturing the reality-resistant bubble in which Trumpists live, I’ll keep trying. Because, years from now, wandering amongst the rubble, I don’t want my grandchildren (or theirs) to think I was among those gone silent as democracy crumbled around us; when our government, helmed by an amoral, ultracrepodarian mammothrept excused and enabled by an avaricious, conscienceless Congress, turned away from science, from the needy, from inclusive governance; polluted our land, ignored the climate crisis, dismissed our future as less important than making themselves and their paymasters “a lot richer” now. While average Americans paid the price.
Silence is acquiescence. So, no.
Email Sid Schwab at columnsid@gmail.com.
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