The Chair of the Park County MAGA Republican Central Committee erects signage.
The inquiry these days is why otherwise intelligent and compassionate folks can’t see the MAGA con for what it is. Why do they continue to buy the lies, deception, nonsense, fear, hate, bullshit, bumbling, creepy, eerie, weird, squirrely, hinky, misogynistic, and xenophobic machinations of the dismal message and worldview Trump and his compadres expose, much like the savvy film director highlights the macabre because he knows it will engage the fascination of the least discerning of us all?
What can’t we understand? What aren’t we seeing? Why does MAGA and all of its trappings defy logic?
Why can’t we pinpoint what makes MAGAites tick even up here, where we all embrace our particular paradise? Why does MAGA seem to take on the persona of a rock and roll drummer who frantically pounds 172 beats per minute paradiddles on the snare, slamming hi-hats, thudding the bass drum, pounding the cymbals when the rest of the band is performing America the Beautiful at 80 beats per minute? How can the band ignore the idiot on the drumset, the obnoxious cacophony? The band is there to make beautiful, heartfelt music. The drummer is there to make noise.
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!
“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” – Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens hits the nail. While the band performs the sentiments of hope and grace–“Till selfish gain no longer stain, The banner of the free!”–the drummer doesn’t care about anything except his riff, his thing, his immutable conviction that only he knows what the right tempo is, what the right sentiments of the day are, and only he knows the illogic of his racket is precisely the point of it.
The drummer doesn’t care if his leader lies, cheats, or steals; he knows his leader lies, cheats, and steals. The only thing that matters to the drummer is that his leader gets under the skin of the people the drummer thinks are his nemesis, his enemy. The drummer believes his leader will make all right with the world and will place God back into the heavens over America, where the evildoers, his nemeses, and his enemies will bow down, toe whatever line the leader draws in the fabric of the country, and will salute the cacophony of the drummer’s beat because the beautiful melody of hope, grace, truth no longer defines what America is.
The drummer has abrogated any sense he ever had, if he ever did, of the essential universal worth of hope and grace to the dismal intent of the con. He bows to the leader of the cheerless cult he follows. He embraces the philosophy of we, not them, a singularly dark insistence that he, as an agent of his leader, is divinely empowered to impose the will of a malignant narcissist onto everyone else—whether or not everyone else likes it.
The verse from America the Beautiful is from Katherine Lee Bates’s original version, penned in 1893.
What would Bates think of MAGA? Indeed, what would George Washington think of MAGA?
Oh, yes, the allusion to a drummer will not be lost to some…
NOTE: Check out the perambulations on Facebook.
