In one ear, out the other

It can be frustrating for people who see through the deceitful desperation of Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers, Fox News, right-wing commentators, and familiars in the administration, that polls only show a bare majority supporting Trump’s impeachment. From Day One almost nothing intelligible or factual has evacuated from Trump’s mouth. The Washington Post’s current count of factually-challenged statements by Trump since he entered the White House now exceeds 14,000—which seems an impossible number for a “normal” person to acquire in an entire lifetime, but for an abnormal person who feels the need to spontaneously respond to any fact that bruises his bloated narcissism, it isn’t much of a surprise. It is always the most guilty people who express the most “outrage”; it is like when you call out a racist or a rude, thoughtless person, and his response is not to “discuss” the matter, but an “invitation” to a physical beating—I mean, what more does that person need to do to prove your point? 

It simply doesn’t matter to Trump apologists that he is unfit for his office, everything “bad” about him goes in one ear, and out the other as if none of it “computes” in that mostly empty space between their ears. In fact the only part of their brain that actually “works” is the part that “reacts” to stimuli, whether positive or negative. Negative stimuli might be like when they see, say, a Hispanic male in the vicinity and by instinct they move to check to insure that their car doors are locked. “Positive” stimuli is rhetoric that “justifies” this racism, which Trump and his familiars frequently provide. Immigration policy appears to be what Trump’s non-billionaire supporters most “appreciate” about him, and it isn’t just about illegal immigration—that was just the “appetizer.” After all, Trump’s most evil familiar, Stephen Miller, once told a high school classmate that they couldn’t be “friends” anymore because he was Hispanic, and more recently Miller privately admitted that he couldn’t be happier if all immigration from non-European countries ended. We are now learning that Trump has “quietly” promulgated policies that will cut legal immigration by 65 percent, primarily affecting those persons who most excite racism, such as those from what Trump labeled “shithole” countries.

But if it is true that Trump supporters are incapable of processing the fact of his criminality and his wholesale destruction of the tenets that really makes this country “great,” that doesn’t mean that those who do “process” it are necessarily “innocent” of all wrongdoing. I have found that many white “liberals” in race matters are only so in the abstract; they become uncomfortable when forced to deal with it as a physical presence. You see fewer and fewer blacks and Hispanics in Seattle these days, displaced by “gentrification” and “replaced” by an ever increasing number of east and south Asians with their own brand of prejudices that go unremarked on. Thus whenever I hear discussions about, say, migrant children in concentration camps on the border, I ask myself the same question as a border agent did when he overheard a white female reporter talking breathlessly about what she had seen to someone on the other end of the line: at the end of the day, does anybody really care enough to do something about it? After all, Trump supposedly signed an executive order banning child separations, yet those separations have in fact doubled since then.

Ironies abound in the discussion of immigration, of course. By any definition India would be the biggest “shithole” country of them all, given that a few years ago the World Health Organization found that 60 percent of that country’s population—800 million people—were so poor that they were not availed to indoor toilet facilities, although since then India’s current prime minister began a crash program of constructing what can only be truthfully described as outhouses for the poor. But the privileged castes from India who live like kings relative to the vast majority of the population are more than welcome to come to this country and import their own brand of class and caste bigotry, which explains why there are so many serving in the Trump administration. While white Americans with college degrees can’t find “suitable” jobs, even in so-called “tech” jobs that are nothing more than data-entry office drone work, because they are not “qualified.”

 “Qualification” has more to do with how people “fit in.” In the downtown Seattle office building I currently work in, there is a General Electric subdivision occupying one floor whose manager is Indian, and most of the people working under him are Indian as well; I recall on one occasion he approached me and inquired with undisguised apprehension if I had access to his floor “at all hours.” And caste “privilege” isn’t just in the virtual takeover of convenience store, motel businesses and by Indian-owned companies that employ only Indians through the H1-B visa program. I recently observed to my astonishment a commercial truck being driven by a Sikh, with an image on the door announcing the truck was owned by a company called “Punjab Transit,” with those words superimposed on the outline of the Indian state of Punjab. Huh? Are we talking about a people who are trying to create their own “state” within a state? And racist fanatics like Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Jeanine Pirro are fulminating over the “great replacement” of the country by Hispanics?

When it comes right down to it, instinctive bigotry against Hispanics in the generality is the principle fodder feeding Trump’s support. I recall when I was in Army basic training, a drill sergeant asked me “Is that the way you fold your socks, you Mexican?” I told him I wasn’t “Mexican,” and he “corrected” himself by calling me in turn a “Puerto Rican” and a “Cuban,” before settling on “whatever you are”—anything but an American just like him. Thus I don’t live in a world of illusion; I know where I “stand” in the eyes of a world filled with paranoia and ugly stereotyping. I know that the spaces between white, black and Asian bigotry are hard places. I take with a grain of salt the hypocrisy of gender fanatics like Elle Reeve, who made the hypocritical assertion in a recent CNN story that “misogyny” drives white supremacy, claiming that it is “rare” for white women to be racist. Naturally she either ignores or blames the “patriarchy” all those incidents of racist ranting toward Hispanics or threatening blacks with guns for just being in the vicinity that seem to involve white women far more often than white men. I mean, you don’t have to be a dues paying member of a white supremacist organization to be a raving, nonsensical racist who believes in paranoid racial conspiracies (and let’s not forget that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016, and that number probably won’t drop under 50 percent in 2020 if he is still around).  

And it isn’t just trailer-trash blondes, but supposedly “educated” and self-styled “progressive” women who are infected by paranoid racist stereotyping—especially toward Hispanic males. Instead of being a hypocritical self-congratulator, women like Reeve need to sit down with a good book, like Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s recent tome, Mothers of Massive Resistance, and rediscover how white women were the foot soldiers in the war against integration and resistance against civil rights—and not all that much has changed in the mind—in evidence by the frequency of white women who have served as the “face” of anti-affirmative action lawsuits involving college admissions, even though historically they have been the principle beneficiaries of affirmative action, and remain so with Title IX, which because the vast majority of its beneficiaries are white (and are voters), it is not politically fashionable to call it what it is and thus “harm” white women.

Ah, hell. I started this post to talk about the insanity of Trump supporters, and ended-up talking about the world that I have been forced to live by mendacious people of any ideological stripe. In the end, for me, all this hypocrisy renders virtually everything I hear as a little more than a grain of salt, small enough to pass through one ear and out the other. I don’t have a great deal of faith that if Trump somehow survives to stand re-election, that enough voters will do the “right” thing. Trump is doing what his “base” wants him to do, and those who oppose him are too fraught with their own competing agendas that don’t stand particularly close scrutiny.