Liberty Yell: The TRiUMPh of Nothing

By Matthew Sperling on Feb 24, 2016 at 07:46 PM in Featured Essays

Liberty Yell: The TRiUMPh of Nothing

It is the night of the 2016 Republican caucus in Nevada, where an exhausted political party has put down a tall stack of chips and rolled snake eyes.

I just watched Donald Trump as he said, describing part of his victorious voting block, “I love the poorly educated!”

Yeah, right. You love them because they don’t have the tools to understand that you’re a threat not only to their existence but to the future of the entire planet.

The talking heads on CNN were also saying that Trump’s electability numbers are rising. And, in polls, he matches up pretty well against Clinton and Sanders.

Stop. Everyone. Imagine Trump’s finger on the button. Have we finally reached the lemming stage of human existence? Are we in the grip of some kind of biological imperative to throw ourselves and our civilization off a cliff?

All the years of Red Scares and fear of terrorism and the calculated destruction of the American middle class have left too many of us pickled in the brine of cowering failure. America needs to be great again, alright. We need to locate the fundamental beliefs which are supposed to make us a great nation.

It will do no good to trot out the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. While it never hurts to read them, at this point they are in our blood, essential to the means of constructing who we are and what we do, or they are not. We either believe that We the People are created equal and follow that to its logical conclusion, or we abuse the very notion of freedom by pursuing such idiocies as changing the name of french fries to “Freedom Fries.”

America has become a sideshow filled with freaks muttering about our allegedly moslem president who was born in Kenya--or in Hawaii, which might be a foreign country to people dumb enough and racist enough to believe that President Obama isn’t really one of us. Ignorant bigots who hate the idea of building a mosque near Ground Zero. And more of the same ignoramuses opposed to rescuing even a handful of the refugees being absorbed by the hundreds of thousands into the lands in and around the still delicious Freedom Fries.

America has become a freak show managed by the many angry morons employed by Fox News and talk radio, but Donald Trump is the holy carny barker which our nation has been waiting for and evolving toward.

We, apparently, need someone who looks like a badly coifed reincarnation of Mussolini. As the handmade sign put it, “TRiUMPh!” That’s what he may very well turn out to be: The triumph registering the downfall of a once great nation, one which had enough energy and optimism to overthrow an empire, fight a civil war to end slavery, sacrifice to free the world from fascism, and through art and science set the standard not just for American but for human progress.

Are we going backwards into a Dark Age defined by the actions not only of this obviously renegade billionaire but of all the greedy heads and hearts prepared to kill the planet on behalf of the dream of wealth which is always unraveled by death, one way or another.

One way or another, this election may turn out to be a test as to the remaining intelligence, if there is any, of an electorate with the world still riding on its shoulders. If we fail, it will certainly lead to tremendous harm for our country, even if the rest of the world moves beyond the late great American empire, assuming such a thing is possible. Assuming our empire can be disconnected from a better future for our planet.

By the way, if you haven’t seen Michael Moore’s new film, “Where to Invade Next,” please go and see it. A wonderful piece of propaganda about the America which should be.