By Leonard Adame
The American Character What is that, exactly? To me, it is propaganda, a tale told by several idiots, all of it signifying nothing but the acquisition of power and wealth.
Not nearly enough people have read Macbeth or The Sound and the Fury. The former inspired the latter. While both works overflow with meaning and meanings, we can take one, if we pay attention, as maybe the most significant: that life is an illusion, a nightmare, a realm in which idiots rule. And the ruling classes, arrogant as they are, believe they rule by divine right, that their actions, declarations, and beliefs can never be questioned much less challenged.
With apologies to both esteemed authors, it is not hard to place Donald Trump and many if not all Republicans in the idiot category, a group of delusional characters whose main talents are idiocy, crassness, sycophantic behavior, and obviously, to a critical viewer, a false adherence to God and religion. Doesn’t matter that these fake and critically inept idiots would not survive an intellectual conversation on God and religion. But if they’re on TV, they automatically have credibility.
Hence, we have growing mob of individuals who idolize idiotic beliefs, who salivate as their idiotic heroes become more and more outrageous in their racism and xenophobia and misogyny. The mob goes wild, as they often do in a “Gunsmoke” episode or like the derelicts in Braveheart, who cheer, drink and egg on the hangmen. No need to think about the principles that led to the hangings, oh, little things like self-defense or monarchical corruption, or, in the “Gunsmoke” episode, the achievement of justice in the face of judicial apathy. Nope, the executions have always been unquestionably the work of God. Yes, once God is thrown in the mix, anything goes. There are any number of idiots/Republicans who invoke God, who hide behind the bible (though they’ve misunderstood its meanings, its contexts, its philosophies), who display sound and fury as if they were virtues.
One could go on and on about the idiocy, about this tale we call life and its sounds and eternal fury. But most wouldn’t understand. Most wouldn’t care to understand, especially those minimally educated but bloated with bigotry and racism and hatred of anyone not white.
Even those who have been “highly educated” are guilty of the idiocy of ignorance when it comes to the politics of people of color. Many educated and saturated with white privilege, think themselves above understanding cultures that come from other countries. Look at the indigenous population of this country. How many privileged white people have read Black Elk Speaks or the story of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce? Even if they were assigned these seminal works in school, they came away from them with a minimum of understanding, having arrogantly concluded that the words had no meaning for them since they were not about American culture, which is highly ironic since what we call American culture was built on the appropriations of cultures of people of color. Pick a category: food, science, sports, medicine, philosophy, etc… and you’ll soon see that white “scholars” appropriated much of what people of color developed. Yet according to the appropriators, anything technologically valuable was developed by white people.
Here’s what is true: that Americans, even those of color, have lived and are living on the misery of people of color.
The Trumpites know NOTHING about this history. Nothing. They substitute arrogance, egoism, violence, mendacity, propaganda, and hatred for the virtues of historical truths.
If the devil stirs and somehow Trump becomes president, we just need to look at Nazi Germany (hell, how many people know that history?) to see our fate, especially, the dark times ahead for people of color. Idiots reigned supreme during that apocalyptic time, creating sound and fury and turning life into a skulking shadow that haunted everyone—in fact, no matter their color in many cases.
In the late ‘20s and mid- ’30s, several Germans warned against the idiocy of Hitler and his sycophants and their cruelty and inhumanity. Too many Germans, nevertheless, remained apathetic, thinking they were above any suspicion and that they were favored because they were Aryans and good white Germans.
Still, they ended up in the death camps along with the Jews, Romas, and other people that Hitler hated.
Could happen here, you know.
