Tyrant

Until my mid-teens I bought everything America was selling. I swallowed brand USA with the naivete and fervor of a Trump University sucker.

I watched the westerns with chisel-jawed heroes like Randolph Scott and John Wayne fighting bad guys and blood-thirsty Indians. I idolized actor Audie Murphy who overcame his thespian shortcomings because audiences knew the decorated World War II veteran had the real life chops to play heroes.

Back before the Me Too Movement, I laughed as Bob Hope delivered scantily clad show girls and double entendres to American service men protecting the world from communists in lonely far away outposts.

I worshiped Davie Crockett, Daniel Boone, Colonel Travis, Kit Carson. Resourceful men of integrity and true grit.

I looked up to your Presidents. I particularly liked Kennedy, the good Catholic family man whose philandering went unreported, when he faced down the tyrant Khrushchev. In my youthful mind U.S. Presidents represented a country with principles, a country that stood up to tyranny, no matter the cost, to keep us all safe.

The truth is, I wanted to be an American, not a polite Canadian with second rate celebrities, earnest heroes and boring politicians.

Then I grew up. Or at least expanded intellectually.

The illusion of America the Great, did not shatter immediately, smashed upon a sharp rock of reality. It peeled away, layer by layer, as historical truths gleaned from a lifetime of reading and travel began to sink in.

In this era of alternate facts and truth isn’t truth, here are a few myth shattering irrefutable facts easily verified on Google:

The Constitution Americans so revere was formulated by bigoted white men who viewed the concept of liberty through the toilet paper tube view of race. The liberty they envisioned did not include black people who slaved on their plantations, yellow people who died at back breaking labour for meager pay or red people whose lands were usurped in a cultural genocide that would eventually be given the highfalutin name of Manifest Destiny.
The United States is not a true democracy in which the majority rules. Money is the determining factor in getting elected. Lots of money. Even then the Presidential candidate who gets the most votes doesn’t always win, as evidenced by two of the last three Presidents. The Electoral College system was created to appease slave states. It is so complicated and antiquated most Americans could not tell you how it works, or why. The Senate is a smoke and mirrors democratic institution: in choosing a Supreme Court Justice who will determine the country’s direction for decades, a representative from Wyoming who might represent a couple hundred thousand voters carries the exact same weight as a Senator from California who represents 20 million constituents.
The U.S. is not a country in which no man is above the law. As if he were a Medieval monarch, the President retains the absolute power to pardon anyone of any crime, be it friend, family member or accomplice. It is an open question among constitutional scholars whether a President can pardon himself. Enough said.
The United States is not the land of the free. In America, incarcerating its own people is big business. The U.S. imprisons more of its citizens than any country in the world. It’s not even close.
The Supreme Court is not an impartial body above politics. This is a claim stunning in its brazenness, given the disgraceful nominating process the world just witnessed. Justices are appointed by the politicians in charge on the basis of their ideology. Period.
The U.S. is not the greatest country in the world, a place where all the rest of us want to live. It is a country that spends more on its military than the next five countries combined while its infrastructure crumbles and Americans die because they can’t afford health care. Once great cities like Detroit have been reduced to Third World dereliction. Chicago is a war zone. No one wants to move to Flint and drink toxic water or go to Puerto Rico to sit in the dark. It is a scary country whose heavily armed citizens are killing each other in nightclubs and movie theatres, restaurants and parks, churches and schools in record shattering numbers. The majority of the non-desperate world citizens prefer to live in stable countries and many no longer want to visit the States.
The U.S. has never been the shining city on the hill, a beacon of integrity for all the world to see. It is a country that has always put its own interests first regardless of morality. It has pillaged the world’s resources, never putting a dollar into a Third World country without the expectation of getting two out. The feigned indignation expressed by Lindsay Graham at the Saudis for killing a journalist, the same red-faced sputterings he unleashed at the “non-political” Kavanaugh hearings, would make for great satire if the subject matter wasn’t so horrifying. As Graham well knows, the U.S. has a long sordid history of propping up murderous tyrants, from Anastasia Somoza in Nicaragua to the Shah of Iran, from Saddam Hussein to Manual Noriega in Panama, until the latter’s blatant drug dealing became too public. America threw in with corrupt Vietnamese generals while dropping bombs, napalm and Agent Orange on people fighting for the right to determine their own country’s fate. All in the name of their own national interests. Meanwhile Graham’s new BFF is cozying up to the current generation of tyrants, professing love for the North Korean thug who had his half-brother killed in a Singapore airport and returned the broken body of a barely alive U.S. student who pilfered a poster. The hypocritical Graham will no doubt eventually fall in line with U.S. leaders who are blatantly providing a cover story for a repressive tyrant who murdered a U.S.-based journalist then cut up his body.
Perhaps the greatest myth of all is inherent in the country’s name. The United States of America is anything but united. The plain-spoken, politically incorrect fact that nobody on network or cable television wants to say out loud is that the U.S. comprises a society in which a significant portion of its populace has deplorable values. There can be no other explanation for Donald Trump, who is a symptom not the cause of the country’s spiritual sickness. Hillary had it right. Trump supporters are deplorable. They laugh uproariously when their Dear Leader mocks a disabled person or sexual assault victim. They chant “Lock her up!” when he chastises a political opponent and then nod reverently when he tells them accused sexual predators are innocent until proven guilty. Trump supporters are the “very fine people” who marched with tiki torches and killed a woman in Charlottesville. They profess their love of Jesus and family values while supporting a man who cheats on his wife with porn stars, lies pathologically and admits to grabbing women by their private parts, a guy who bullies the weak but barely stops short of oral sex for strongmen like Putin. They cluck when he takes babies and young children from their mother’s arms but take secret comfort in the fact desperate foreigners will soon have to climb over a 30-foot wall to get into the country. They give fealty to a man who drapes himself in the flag but avoided military service when his country called. They say America First but support a tax cheat who always put himself before his country. Deplorable is as deplorable does.

We’re not in Kansas anymore folks. We are down the Wizard of Orange’s rabbit hole in an uncharted land where the Wizard spews venom into cyberspace from a gilt-edged glass tower as his subjects squabble over the veracity and implications of his petulant inanities.

America, are you feeling great again?

The days of swine and orangeness leading up to the Mango Megalomaniac’s inauguration seem even more surreal when contrasted with the decency and grace of the outgoing Obama administration as witnessed in his thoughtful and heartfelt farewell speech.

American people, you are about to receive what you so richly deserve; unfortunately you may well take the rest of us down with you.

Let’s look at where things stand in the days and hours before the transition. We now know the Evil Orange Clown was elected with the help of America’s sworn enemy , a thieving, murderous, communist dictator on a mission to destabilize your democracy and change the world order to one with a somewhat lesser emphasis on freedom.

The man you’ve given the nuclear codes to continues to support the thug he has called a better leader than your outgoing President and instead questions the abilities and motives of the men and women in your intelligence agencies who risk their lives for your liberty, likening these patriotic sons and daughters of America to Nazis.Your Commander-in Chief has myriad worldwide financial holdings, with possible unknown interests in Russia, but still refuses to release his tax returns while bragging that he is not bound by conflict of interest guidelines. Can you say treason?

Trump’s campaign promise to Drain the Swamp in Washington notwithstanding, he has assembled a cabinet of old rich white guys of dubious provenance.

His choice for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, in 1986 was only the second nominee in 50 years to be denied a federal judgeship by the Senate because of his questionable record on race. When asked in this week’s confirmation hearing whether a secular person could understand the truth as well as a religious person Sessions silenced the room with his ignorance, “Well, I’m not sure,” he said. He is also known for saying, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” No judgement on his country’s booze swillers. A snarly swamp dog born and inbred on the bayou.

The man Trump put forward as the next Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, former head of Exxon Mobile, received a 180-million-dollar payout from the oil giant for his service, which included billion dollar oil deals with the Russians for which he was awarded that country’s Order of Friendship from the dictator/thug Vladimir Putin. An American crocodile, smooth and shiny, with sharp teeth and periscope eyes that scope out weakness.

Trump’s selection for Secretary of Defense, retired Major General James Mattis, nicknamed “Mad Dog” by the marines who served under him, earned the moniker with quotes like the one in which he outlined a rule for his troops to live by while on duty in Iraq: “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” In keeping with the national gun obsession he has also noted, “It’s fun to shoot some people.” A heavily armed bull frog sitting on his fortified lily pad.

Showing the breadth of his questionable judgement, Trump put forward climate change denier Scott Pruitt, a highly-paid shill for the fossil fuel industry, as his man to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Despite conclusions drawn by 97 per cent of the world’s top scientists that climate change is real, Pruitt claims the issue is “far from settled.” A opportunistic snake slithering along a Cypress branch a few feet above the water, its forked tongue darting..

The Evil Orange Clown has chosen Michael Flynn as his National Security Advisor. Flynn, who led chants of “Lock her up” during the presidential campaign was fired as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. A new world order fantasist, he was a semi-regular paid commentator on Russia’s state-owned propaganda Network RT and has dined with the dictator Putin. He has called the Muslim religion a “vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people that needs to be excised.” An alligator sunning on a log, ready to clamp its jaws around any unsuspecting prey and drown it in the murky water.

The swamp isn’t being drained, folks, it’s being repopulated. Are you feeling great yet, America?

Let’s exit the rabbit hole and get real for a minute. The country you never tire of telling the rest of us is ‘the greatest country in the world’ was founded on slavery and genocide. Your revered first president George Washington prospered on the backs of his slaves before, having no further use for their sweat and blood in the afterlife, released them upon his death. You bought and sold black people for a hundred years, then lynched them and denied them the right to participate in the American dream long after emancipation and continue to kill, imprison and marginalize your own citizens in the new Millennium.

You grabbed the entire land mass from sea to shining sea under a doctrine called Manifest Destiny, which essentially stated that inevitability and rule of might entitled the government to move the indigenous people who had lived on the land for thousands of years onto unsuitable reservations where they withered and died from disease and starvation. Your government broke treaty after treaty while your armies waged war against bedraggled ‘hostiles’ whose only crime was they wanted to live peacefully in their homeland. It took a maverick judge in the late 1800s to rule that Indians were people, and as such had the same rights as other Americans to live where they wanted, a ruling that your government constantly subverted to satisfy your greed for their land. George Custer and the Seventh Calvary were not massacred by the Sioux but instead were routed and killed in a battle against a superior force after Custer launched an unprovoked attack against a peaceful Indian encampment. Your troops murdered then dismembered and mutilated women and children at Sand Creek, proudly wearing female genitalia as hat bands. You paid bounties for Indian scalps.

These are facts Americans prefer to sweep under the historical carpet when they tout freedom and liberty for all.

Your so-called democracy is structured in such a way the majority does not rule, as evidenced by the election that gave you Donald Trump. The system has been perverted and corrupted by money and greed, which allows the one per cent to rule the rest through a financial coup. You profited on the First World War for years before entering the fray near its end then took credit for the victory. You got involved in the ‘last just war’ only after being attacked two years after its start, watching from the safety of your isolation while your allies took the beating. Your government and corporations have exploited and plundered the world, propping up tyrants and befriending mass murderers when it was deemed to be in your national interests, never putting a dollar in without the expectation of getting two dollars out.

You are the greatest country in the world only in the sense that you have the most powerful military and are prepared to use it. You are a divided nation rife with hypocrisy ignorance and religious extremism, a country whose citizens feel justified in murdering and meddling anywhere on the planet if it suits their end goal of materialism over all else, never giving a thought to the depredations wrought on innocents so you can have cheap gas, two cars and a big screen TV. You now practice Manifest Destiny on a global scale with a sense of entitlement that is breathtaking.

The rise of Donald Trump has been centuries in the making and he is truly a made-in-America president. While other citizens of the world can claim their subjugation to despots and dictators not of their making, Americans can offer no such defense. With all the evidence before them its citizens chose as their leader a misogynist philanderer accused of multiple sexual predations who has dedicated his life to exploiting others for material gain, an ignorant crude bully who takes pride in gaming the system, a prolific liar who intimidates and denigrates his victims, a narcissistic, megalomaniac whose position of power puts the entire planet at risk.

Do you feel great again, America?