Booing the Gov

AT THE ARKANSAS RAZORBACK football game last Saturday, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders was introduced to a crowd of forty four thousand. There were cheers and some polite clapping, but impossible to ignore was a strong, loud chorus of boos,in which I participated. Although it did not come from a majority of the assembled, it did come from a meaningful minority, and although it didn't last long, it made the point very effectively. The point is that although Arkanss is a deeply red state, which voted sixty forty for Trump both times, there is, even in Arkansas,and thus all aross America's fruited plain, considerable disdain for and rejection of the conservative policies promulgated by Trump, Sanders, and the rest of the Republican party, and lapped up whole hog by about thirty percent of the American people, but only thirty percent. Sanders, for those unfamiliar with the world of far right pro Trump politics,is the daugher of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee,and the former spokesperson for Donald J.Trump for the first two years of his presidency. She is the brunette borderline corpulant talking head who from the neck up stood in front of the camera and lied early and ofren to the American people on a daily basis from 2017 to 2019, repeating Trump's on average twenty two point five outlandish lies per day, and not all too infrequently throwing in a few of her own, for good measure. After two years of vicarious presidential prevarication, she caught from her puppet master the political power bug, and off she went to plan and implement her plan for the seizure of power in a largely benighted state where good policy gets you nowhere, and far right lunacy gives you a landslide election victory. She landslided a brilliant, made for the job African-American man whith a PhD in physics, exponentially more intelligence and education than the brunette Trump clone, and a quantum leap bundle of great policy ideas. For those reasons he was doomed from the beginning, before he ever had a chance to shine his electromagnetic brain and personality in the halls of state power. With profound sadness and disgust I recall the campaign debate in which he magnanimously turned to a smug looking Sanders, told her that no matter what he loved her,and was met with an icey, contemptuous downward looking dismissive glare.Good guys,as Leo Durocher famously said, finish last, and so do smart guys and much better qualified than their oponent guys. Sanders, in case you're wondering, now in office for eight long months, is nothing more or less than another one of these clones of Trump. In other words,the DeSantis or Abbot of Arkansas. Critical race theory is already banned, book bans are following fast and furious, and don't say gay, don't be gay. And if you happen to be transexual, good luck finding gender appropriate health and medical care now forbidden in Arkansas,for which one must now go far out of state. As for recognized, legalized equality for LGBTQ folks, fuggettaboutit. At the current rate, before long it will be illegal to be non Christian in red states, organized religion and Christian only prayer will be back in public schools where they don't belong, and America's children will have forgotten all about the existence of racism, sexual and religious diversity, and ethnic minorities, all of which will have faded into the dustbin of right wing false narrative history. But public educaion may also become a thing of the past, for in Arkanas, thanks to Sarah and her Trumpist legislator enablers, money for public education is being siphoned off and thrown headlong at private, religious based voucherized indoctrination, supposedly free market schools, which, like most of capitalism,simply cannot sustain its cannibalistic self without a little help from its friends, aka, socialism. But Razorback fans booed. Thus there is a glimmer of hope, for not only Razorback football, but for Arkansas, the nation, and civilization as a whole.