“The only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump’s] supporters.”
the current occupant of the Oval Office, Tuesday
I don’t know who screened the warm-up acts for Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend, but they passed a “comedian” who referred to Puerto Rico as “literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”
Now maybe you’re old enough to remember a time when edgy, unflattering stereotypes were part-and-parcel of mainstream comedy. We laughed at others because we could laugh at ourselves.
Those days are long-gone, of course. We live now in Thin-Skinned America, where comedy must be inoffensive before it can be deemed funny.
And that’s why it was a bad idea to give this particular comic the mic at MSG. It only served to fuel The Outrage Machine.
But then, in a gift to the Trump campaign, the current occupant of the Oval Office decided to pile on:
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
And just like that, an unforced error became a rallying cry.
As they’d embraced epithets like “bitter clingers” and “deplorables,” Trumpers proudly began declaring themselves “garbage.” Memes were born and rocketed around social media.
The better you know your history, the more likely you are to be smiling at such a turnabout. Before the Revolutionary War, British officers and troops sang a little ditty, “Yankee Doodle,” to demean American soldiers as simple-minded and unsophisticated. Defiant colonists took up the song as their own, adding verses and even marching to the tune.
What once had been a musical insult was transformed into an expression of national pride.
I don’t know if George Washington ever joined his troops in singing “Yankee Doodle.” But yesterday, Trump appeared at a Wisconsin rally in a garbage truck, wearing a sanitation worker’s hi-vis vest.
If you can look at that and still don’t “get” Donald J. Trump, I really don’t know what else to say. It is, in microcosm, The Trump Phenomenon.
But here’s the crux — millions of Deplorables wearing Ultra MAGA hats and posting trash bags on their Facebook pages means nothing unless it translates to action. It matters only if every “fuck you” becomes a vote.
The expected cold front, with an angry line of severe weather ahead of it, plowed across Oklahoma and Kansas, entering Missouri and Arkansas late last night. By the time it got to our slice of Ozarkansas, however, its potential for producing tornadoes and large hail had all but vanished.
We definitely had a noisy night on The Mountain. Lots of thunder and lightning. (No fires reported.) And we got rain — sweet, blessed rain.
The sound of it on our roof was simply wonderful.
When it was over, I found 2-1/4 inches in our rain gauge. Deb observed water in Crooked Creek and Shawnee Town Branch, too, during her morning commute.
There’s more on the way this weekend, they say, and early next week. We’ll take all we can get.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB
#BitterClinger #Deplorable #UltraMAGA #Garbage