This one concerns Donald Trump. Because of course it does.
Specifically, it relates to the night of Feb. 5, and his sharing a video on Truth Social, his own social media site, with a short segment tacked on at the end in which the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama were superimposed onto the cartoon bodies of apes.
So the objectively stupidest president in our nation’s often boneheaded history, the undisputed clown-car king of This Time, attempted, via one of the oldest racist tropes in the old-white-man canon, to malign one of the smartest men ever to hold our highest office, along with one of the classiest, most accomplished and beloved of First Ladies.
Because I’m petty, let me add that Trump’s own wife, his third, his second foreign-born one, the scowling single-word brand “Melania,” our present First Lady, has been posited by a reputable member of the European press as once having been a paid escort (and who has, in another point of you-can-look-it-up fact, been made an honorary sex worker by the city of Amsterdam). #BeBest.
White House damage-control flack/animate leaky septic field Karoline Leavitt dubbed the resulting uproar over Trump’s post “fake outrage,” even as both sides of the political aisle clamored for the video to be taken down. It soon was, with nary a hint of an apology from Trump. Because, of course, Trump.
My own disgust was certainly pretty fucking genuine, Karoline, in case you’re counting. Not to mention that Trump’s odious posting also dredged up, for me, an unwanted personal memory:
A little more than a decade ago, I was stranded in a terrible job, employed by terrible people. Some are dead now, good riddance, hope Hell’s door whapped the bejesus out of you on the way in. Some otherwise persist, vociferously, often publicly pro-Trump (because, surprise). They are a lot like herpes simplex, lurking in wait for whatever next This Time, to erupt anew into something truly goddamn ugly.
To be sure, I should’ve had a better handle on the company owners before accepting that position – handling PR for them, of all things. Yet in floundering about for some meaningful change to the occupational rut that had become my life, I perhaps too willingly overlooked clues these people were dyed-in-the-white-wool racists. (Unsurprisingly, the bulk of their workforce was, and probably still is, foreign-born Hispanic, cranking out their stolen-idea products at bargain-basement, piecework pay.)
I didn’t fathom the full depth of their ugliness until one morning in 2012, several years into my working there, when the company founder burst into my closet of an office, spewing bigoted bile. He’d just seen then-President Obama’s young daughters on the news (Fox News, natch), as the two girls boarded Air Force One.
Like a lot of people, I’d too eagerly allowed myself to get swept up in the cozy lie of Obama being elected in the first place – that overt bigotry had at long last been driven under the slimy rock where it belonged. That the old hatemongers who gorged on racist venom had finally been forced into public silence by an upswing in our greater shared humanity, as they and their virulent views teetered toward ever-yawning graves.
In the interminable months since Trump’s second election win, I’ve found myself periodically recalling a particular bygone news item, from 2008. First attributed to once-respected FiveThirtyEight.com, it’s since become something of a narrative meme, the various elaborations on/omissions from the original article all detailing someone canvassing for Obama in a poorer-white section of western Pennsylvania (or in Indiana, though I myself somehow remembered western Virginia).
The gist of it:
At one particular stop, after the woman who opened the door had confirmed she and her husband intended to vote, and the canvasser then asking whom the couple intended to support, the woman turned from the door, yelling back into the house, to find out. A man’s voice rang out from behind her, “We’re voting for the nigger!”
The woman turned again to the canvasser. “We’re voting for the nigger,” she said.
Serious cringe, yes. But even uncomfortably clad progress still counts as progress, right?
If it’s real, sure.
If it’s real. Because not a scant four years following Obama’s first election-win, there loomed overt, unapologetic racism, alive and well, and pressing itself confidently into my personal space, literally owning the space where I stood.
I haven’t a clue now how long that cowardly old goat raved at me, just that my face had grown red-hot from anger – and that’s even before he let loose the expression “porch monkeys” about the Obama girls. It was only through sheer force of will that I didn’t then strike him in his sagging face. I was visibly shaking, my fists involuntarily balled at my sides, the right one actually jerking upward a bit before I realized it. There would be white fingernail impressions inside my hands for a good while after.
I had come this close to involuntarily punching an old man.
That foul fuck finally picked up on my barely contained fury, which he clearly had not anticipated, fellow white guy, etc., and promptly turned tail out of my office. He would pointedly avoid me for the next several days.
Would that I’d had the wherewithal to quit that job right then and there. But I was my own kind of coward, dragging along dejectedly for what seemed an eternity, which was actually seven years in total, increasingly miserable and at odds with myself.
My time there concluded only when the founder’s son, the somewhat more tactful racist who had originally recruited me for the job, in part by playing up how we’d hung out a bit back in the day, when we were both about 14, had me canned while he was off cavorting with his young post-divorce wife on some rented yacht in the Caribbean.
That’s so Redneck Richie Rich you might presume some of it hyperbole, or that I made at least part of it up. Nope.
I was 45 years old at that point, never having been fired before, from any job. Nonetheless, that preening goober did for me what I failed at first to recognize was the greatest of favors. I’d been lurching around in a sad little desperation dance, tripping over my own feet in trying to free myself from that toxic place (overzealous cover letters, painfully over-earnest job interviews, etc., failure upon failure). During that same time, I quietly helped three other soured employees get hired out of there, all while being unable to do a goddamn useful thing to extricate myself.
My mental health, for much of my adult life a rudderless boat, became snarled in treacherous shoals – a submerged forest of deadheads, to really juice the metaphor – with me drowning in fits and starts at each new rise in rank water.
Through it all, the impotent rage festered. Tentacles of anger grew ever inward, eventually encircling every facet of my life, to routinely burst forth in self-directed explosions over whatever new injury du jour. It became my pattern. It became me.
Little can be as ridiculous as a fury-fixated wannabe-pacifist, a perpetually roiling would-be Buddhist.
Nearly two years after my inglorious exit from that soul-suck of a job, and barely then into the first Trump administration, I stumbled into some unusual, if dramatically effective, anger-management therapy. It offered a path back to my own life, enabling me to salvage most of the relationships I valued.
I clearly haven’t become overwhelmingly charitable to everyone since. Hence, let me add here, for anyone who somehow continues in support of this festering-cold-sore of an administration, and who, through that repellent association alone, likewise supports the blatant racism Trump no longer feels he needs to downplay:
One day, all y’all will have dropped the fuck dead, good riddance, hope Hell’s door whapped the bejesus out of you on the way in, etc. Every machine-gun-headed, knuckle-dragging one of you. Every pride-warped pillock of prejudice and pretzel-morals MAGA minion.
All of you, with your absurdly ironic ideas of racial superiority, dead.
The world will finally shit free your odious influence, bright flowers one day blooming from the fetid dust of your memories. That is, of course, assuming we have not by then poisoned this world to the point where nothing, not even hope, can any longer take root.
For all of us who aspire each day to becoming more human, may this extinction event of terrible people clinging to terrible ideas come to pass sooner rather than later.
That’s a pretty heavy place for all of this to wind up, I admit. Not to mention it’s one helluva maudlin message.
So let me just shoehorn in this lighter bit, right here at the end, which still passingly adheres to where this post began:
Nearly a decade before that aforementioned noxious work encounter, I was again stranded, this time in Elizabeth City, N.C., a place I despise, though for reasons not altogether fair to the town. Stranded in what at that point was the worst job I’d ever held, and immediately following my unhappily walking away from the gig of my dreams, down in Key West.
In my final months in Elizabeth City, late-summer 2002, following a couple additional job changes, I had signed on as editor, writer and principal photographer for Water Colors, a monthly lifestyle magazine of the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. This found me one afternoon in the home of an affluent family that owned a pet monkey. Skylar, their 10-month-old capuchin, wore a custom-fitted diaper, his twitchy tail poking out the back.
Skylar, at left, with owner. Above, just before the crash.
During my chaotic visit, Skylar trapped and ate several house flies. He stole one of my pens, and ripped the page I was writing on right out of my notebook, skittering across the floor with it and, as I chronicled it back then, “holding up my tattered notes like a flag of victory.” He tackled the family’s dog, Budweiser (really, Budweiser). He knocked a porcelain tea set from a coffee table. He stuck his small, eager face into both glasses of water the family tried to serve me. He climbed up my shirt, his slim fingers abruptly nabbing a pawful of my chest hair – grooming me, I was told, for any bugs that might be lurking there.
It was during his last endeavor, with wily Skylar chattering away at me all the while, like a, well, you know, and my attempting nonetheless to concentrate on what the family was saying, that I turned briefly from my manic assailant – only to have him plant a wet kiss squarely upon my unsuspecting lips.
I recoiled, startled, perhaps even offended in some species-est sort of way. Everyone else human laughed uproariously, of course, because … yeah, it was ultimately pretty goddamn amusing. For all I know, Skylar got a good chuckle out of it as well. So let us end there, just there, abandoning this post’s ugly starting point, of racist simian references hurled like handfuls of fresh poop by a subhuman maroon, to instead embrace some full-on monkey funny, yay!
Except that, to be honest, I can’t help now but think … maybe just hold on a sec here …
A compulsively impulsive creature never evolved to being human. In a diaper. Wreaking havoc on every single thing it touches. Forcing unsolicited, unwanted “affection.”
Aw, fuck. We’re right back to Donald Trump again, aren’t we?
