I have a column to write but as I took a break some of the news I just posted brought me to that post title.
Last night I woke up at 3AM and to turn my mind off read fifteen pages of the book I will soon finish after seven years Driven Off. It covers the period of the Karl Rove book I also finished off after several starting it not long after its publication, perhaps around 2015. If you want to know why Trump is obsessing about tariffs its a good read as it describes President McKinley’s election in 1896 as one of the most important ever. Rove’s thesis seems to be that corporate America was saved.
McKinley in his presidency was tied to racist policies much like Teddy Roosevelt his successor was. For Teddy inviting the most preeminent black educator, Booker T. Roosevelt, to a lunch in the White House just about cost him support in the South. For McKinley it was the Chinese in the American west who were being burned out of “chinatowns” in city after city.
The white defenders of Chinese non citizens and the few born in an America that did its damndest to keep breeder Chinese women away from a mostly batchelor Chinese worker population came in two categories. The businesses that wanted cheep labor and middle class families that liked hard working docile and efficient Chinese servants. This pissed off heavily White Irish Unions and KKK supporters who flooded into the West from the ruined economies of the Civil War South. The similarities and differences between Chinese and newly freed slaves are fascinating. I’ll be chewing them over for another 100 pages.
But now to the shithole countries by which Donald Trump mostly means black African American countries. Not surprising from a man whose Dad once got in a fight with opponents of American Nazis, Fought a battle royal with the Federal Government to keep black people out of his apartments in violation of the Fair Housing laws (which by the way might be mentioned in a column I’m working on tentatively titled Trump’s Queer) and leading a lynch mob to kill innocent black kids. Well I recall when New York put its trash on “garbage skows” and dumped it off the New York coast killing its once thriving oyster industry. Today all that trash is sent to places like Africa making them and not America real shit holes to keep Trump Properties spick and span.
But as one of the news stories reports all that shit sent off to the rest of the world ends up in the ocean where we all get more plastic for our children’s brains.
Yes. Trump world that loves cheap labor can’t hide from shit by preventing American business from hiring illegal workers to deal with it here. We are in a sort of denial that reminds me of the Republican 1920’s Jazz Age. It seems to have bread a new generation of hedonistic party people. After Trump weakens our democracy it will be interesting to see what kind of a world we will wake up into. I plan to live long enough to see it but I won’t be asleep like today’s fake Republicans. I’ll keep working on trying to become Trump’s worst nightmare or at least a part of a nightmare army.
