Spoiling the System

ON THE SURFACE, they're harmless, ostensibly, superficially innocuous. Many have warm, fuzzy mundane southern names and nicknames like "Big(oted)" Bobby, "Sad(istic) Harold, funny sounding, redneck names. But as they grow and multiply in numbers, they fester and coalesce, and eventually become poisonously contagious. Only when they become sufficiently numerous and politically active to affect public policy do they become truly dangerous. Beneath their MAGA caps and spread piously across their tobacco stained overalls they were their fundamentalist Christian faith and ultra conservative street cred as if it the two go together, as if they were a badge of honor, rather than of shame. For the sake of identification and clarity, let us henceforth refer to them as Lowlife conservative number one (LLC1), and Lowlife conservative number two (LLC2), a pair of purely hypothetical but indicative American right wing pious punks. LLC1 is a less devout octogenarian, and confides that in his younger years he had his way with women, consent or no consent, much like president Trump, with whose behavior he sees nothing wrong. The old relic is an equal opportunity hater: what's wrong with calling niggers niggers and queers queers? LLC1 hates Lincoln and Roosevelt: the former freed the darkies, and the latter was a damned socialist. Who needs social security? Make america great again, just as it was, sometime, somehow, in some remote, imaginary past, when men were men, not queers, and everyone was on his own, with women quietly seen in the background. LLC1 is the fervently religious one, also in his eighties, eagerly awaiting the return of the lord, or his guaranteed ascent into heaven, whichever make believe event comes first. He hates people who are not saved, and he hates Democrats, all of whom, he piously proclaims, go straight to hell. Low life conservative Christians are the backbone of Trump support. they, like their cult leader, are pure poison, a disease which has infected American culture and politics. Again, the people presented here are purely hypothetical, but they exist, by the tens of millions. To use the term "nigger" is one thing; to defend its use, and to see nothing wrong in using it, is quite another. And instead of of consigning all members of a political party to hell, in the guise of religious piety, why not proclaim the beauty of all people, politically and otherwise, and leave hell to the dustbin of corrupt, primitive, misguided religiosity? We really do not want to return to some by gone far gone idyllic epic which existed, but not at all like we prefer to remember it. Political correctness has cleared the smoke out of our smoke filled rooms; we who grew up in the nineteen sixties grew up breathing our parents smoke; they hadn't the slightest concern for its effects on their, or our health. When we baby boomers were kids, gays and blacks were in hiding, or confined to their side of the street. make America great again? A White patriarchal Christian culture with the sex and booze behind the curtain? No thanks. Hell no thanks.