the ‘president’ + poking the american hornet’s nest

Yesterday, something not at all unexpected, but in no way less foul, was revealed, and which today, in source after source, even on GOP-blinded Fox News, has been confirmed, in one detail after another.

Today the “President,” your president, perhaps, somebody’s President anyway, not mine, not a chance, was revealed, again and again, through his own callous words, as having not one fraction of an ounce of respect for the American military, which he is, in fact, supposed to command. He has frequently and vehemently mocked our own war dead, and those Gold Star families who have lost their beloved sons and daughters under his own office’s “leadership.” He has questioned the honor of American soldiers captured during battle, or the slain whose MIA bodies were never recovered from whatever distant place they literally laid down their lives in service. He has belittled even our wounded who have returned home to face a harder life among the disabled.

“Losers” and “suckers.” Trump has used those very words to describe our soldiers, who sacrifice at a level beyond what the rest of us cannot possibly conceive, with so many of them having given their all, their very lives, for this country.

Losers.

Suckers.

George Rabey, husband and father, handsome, outgoing, reportedly a kind and wonderful man, my own uncle whom I never had the chance to meet, died in the last years of World War II, in which all of my five uncles served, in various branches of the U.S. military. These sons of dirt-poor western European immigrants, these bright, funny, hardscrabble boys, grew into men who readily enlisted to do their part in the fight against genocidic fascism in the very lands their parents had fled, sacrificing their possible all for the country that often labeled them as just one more bunch of dumb hunkies. There but for the too-fickle hand of fate, and any of the rest of them could have met a similar untimely end as did my Uncle George, whom I have always wished I could have known.

And my own father, the youngest of the nine-children family that included these same five brothers, seen in the sailor’s hat in the first photo on this page, and in his U.S. Army uniform in the second, served both in Korea and Vietnam, a career military man, an authority-disdaining individualist who nonetheless swore his time in the service, despite those wildly unpopular American wars, was among his very best. That I even got to know him — or even got to be, honestly — is again just the loaded hand of fate, which did not spare so many thousands of others every bit as worthy as him, to be sure.

You wanna tell me any of these men, my uncles, my own father, passionate lovers of this country, all of them, were suckers, or losers?

I dare you. I double-dog dare you.

And I’ll just bet you I’m not alone. So go ahead, poke the buzzing hornet’s nest of the embattled American soul. Then poke it again. And again. Because sooner or later, you will be reaching for that savior EpiPen, too little, and way too late.

There’s is also my “Uncle” Joe, a close family friend who stuck up for me so many times I cannot but wonder how I’d have survived my youth without him, who parachuted as a young man into Germany, fighting on the front lines up and through the D-Day invasions against Hitler’s own. Had Joe died then, instead of as a medicine-ball-bellied retired bird colonel with hush-hush rumors surrounding him of a covert-intelligence past, cutting the weedy grass around his quiet corner-lot suburban home, this larger-than-life Scottish-American mountain of a man, would his hero status have been reduced to that of simple “loser”?

Go on, tell me it would have. I triple-dog dare you.

My childhood friend Clarence J., who grew up with the stacked odds of being black and male in railroad-bisected housing projects in eastern North Carolina, just one short generation after integration, and who enlisted in the armed services after college, died in an explosion in a routine military helicopter flight off the coast of Africa back in the 1990s. He was phenomenally bright, funny, charismatic, proud. Kind of amazing all around. And gone, poof, just like that.

Call him a sucker. Call him a loser. I dare you. I quadruple-dog dare you.

I am so tempted to call out by name you Trump supporters I personally know, because again, I want you to bring back to me your idiotic desire to see this fool re-elected, so my BP can skyrocket, and I can howl at you the things I am thinking of your personal worth. Tell me that these people I have named, these truer Americans than you or me in so many countless ways, these ghosts now, all of them, who literally and figuratively made me, who helped make this very country, this continuing American experiment that is wounded now almost beyond recognition, tell me how they are the things your vile bone-spurs-coward of a “President” has had the gall to label them.

I am no fan of fighting, of battles, of war, of the vulgarity of sanctioned violence as a way of solving human disputes; I am generally a pacifist, if a very complicated one, with anger issues a mile wide. But the men and women whom we entrust to do this dirtiest of work for us, well, you had damn well better best not tell me they are less than you are, ever. My fat old gimpy don’t-like-fighting ass will literally fight you, I don’t care who you are, if you dare to insult to my face these men I have included here, they like so many other men and women who have likewise served, all knowing their service alone might be their literal demise, yet willingly stepping up anyway. All for you and your appalling lack of gratitude.

I have always had way too much anger, yes. People the likes of you are exactly why.

So let me end on the basest note, because not a one of you damn-fool apologists deserves better.

Fuck you, Donald Trump, you petty milksop blemish of a mere mite of a man, you adipose pile of cowardice and fundamental stupidity. And fuck every one of you actual suckers and losers who still support him, knowing how profoundly incompetent, and un-American, he truly is.

Yes, fuck you. Each and every goddamn one of you.

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