By Hal Brown
I could write about all the shit he’s pulled in the past week. Why bother. Everyone else on Daily Kos is. I’ll just tell you how it makes me feel and what I think of it.
Ted Wheeler, my hometown mayor got tear gassed by Trump’s SS troops when he did the right thing and went to a downtown protest. Maureen Healy, the Chair of History at nearby Lewis and Clark College here was shot above her eye by some kind of supposedly non-lethal projectile. Oh my fucking god this is Trump as Hitler. I’ll go back and put mustaches on my illustration. Maybe that will help mitigate my anger and fear.
Nope, didn't work. I still feeling like going out on my patio and screaming, but I do have neighbors. I hate what he is doing it is what he is doing it with malevolent glee. I despise him personally with a visceral stomach churning hatred. I know hate is not a beneficial emotion unless you can turn it into action but I can’t help it.
I suppose this diary is a passive way to take action, but I know it is mostly venting.
Then Mayor Wheeler takes the step of tweeting out one of the most alarming messages I’ve ever seen:
What the fuck? There’s no way he tweeted this on a whim. He’s not Donald Trump. He’s a thoughtful man. I suspect he did it for a very strategic reason that is pure politics. He wants residents to see these modern day Waffen SS for who they are. He wants to convey that all it would take is for these thugs with assault rifles to have access to magazines loaded with 30 5.56 mm bullets. It isn't a stretch to imagine someone just a bit more psychologically unbalanced than the president snapping in a clip, perhaps thinking he’ll be hailed as a hero and if he gets into trouble certainly pardoned, and starts firing. The next thing you know others could join in the bloodthirsty frenzy. This has happened in wartime with innocent civilians being killed and maimed, and these goons are being led to believe they are at war and there are no such people as innocent civilians.
I won’t get explicit here, but what these bullets do when they hit a person, even in the leg, can be both lethal and devastating. If you’re curious here’s an article abut what these bullets do.
Those of us old enough to remember the Kent State Massacre know what happens when overzealous hate fueled soldiers are given live ammunition and have been brainwashed to see innocent protesters as a dangerous enemy. It is instructive to know that the rifles used by the National Guard in their 13 second shooting spree were only M-1 rifles. Four students were murdered, one permanently paralyzed, and eight others wounded. It is mind boggling to consider what the casualties would have been if the National Guard had the standard issue assault rifles of today.
Is this what Trump wants to be his legacy? Does this coward lust to have blood on his hands? I think these are rhetorical questions.
Some of you may not have been old enough to know that Kent State was a massacre and that four innocent students were murdered in cold blood. It isn't a coincidence that The Tribune Chronicle published “Kent State shootings left mark on students” yesterday.
In fact I haven’t felt the way I feel today until that day in 1970 when I was in graduate school in social work at Michigan State. Michigan State was one of the five large state universities profiled in the book “Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era” as where the campus peace campaign was first spurred.
Thousands of students including all of my friends and classmates where already protesting the Vietnam War, participating in marches, holding all night vigils, teach-ins, and going to rallies; but this incident caused the campus to boil over and my closest friends and I pulled together a group of fellow students and we forced the social work department to go on strike.
Now just a few miles from me protests I would have joined in my younger days are occurring every night. I sit here in a bubble of a retirement community frustrated that as a 76 year old my fear of Covid-19 keeps me at home. I am pissed, really really pissed at myself that I am afraid to be there.
Everyone here knows that FUBAR means fucked up beyond all recognition. Multiply that by 10, at least by 10, and this is what I think Trump has done to the country. I’m not even counting the sickness and deaths by Covid-19 which is often as gruesome in a different way than getting hit in the eye by a teargas grenade.
Oh, and lest you miss the point of my illustration above, Trump has also set the U.S. Constitution on fire.
DC Comics stories make for popular movies. There is one DC comic that is particularly applicable to Donald Trump’s America. It is “Bizarro World” and this tells it all:
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In the Bizarro world of "Htrae", society is ruled by the Bizarro Code which states "Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!"[2] In one episode, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: "Guaranteed to lose money for you". Later, the mayor appoints Bizarro No. 1 to investigate a crime, "Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together". This is intended and taken as a great compliment. Wikipedia
There you have it. My opinionated rant for today complete with the f-word spelled out.
Can it get worse?
Fuck yes. All it will take for Trump to unleash the atavistic bloodlust in his heavily armed, illegal, and accountable only to him storm troopers. He is a modern day Hitler. We could see another Kent State, or worse.
The Poll: We do not know whether these federal thugs routinely carry live ammunition. Real police officers do and have rules about use of deadly force (the breaking of which led to the BLM movement). Whether they do or not the announcement that they are empowered to fire on protestors if they feel “threatened” is right out of the fascist handbook of intimidation.