Summer Reruns

August 13, 2017

Unsettlingly Nostalgic

Trump attacks. That’s how the Donald responds to conflict. We’ve witnessed enough iterations to generalize: CNN shares an embarrassing story about Trump – Trumps attacks, Mitch McConnell fails to get a bill to the Donald’s desk – Trump attacks, Mueller investigates Trump financials – Trump attacks, Jeff Sessions won’t help with containing the investigation – Trump attacks, terrorists strike in France or Great Brittan – Trump attacks the terrorists and the victim country. There’s lots more, he’s blasted Democrats, Republicans, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled people, Judges, women, Australia, Venezuela, Korea and California.

He’s a one trick pony in a great big tent. (metaphor intentionally mixed – I like the image)

Trump attacks.

Except for two very specific things: Vladimir Putin, and the far right.

For example, just last week, the Donald thanked Putin for expelling 750 U.S. diplomats. (His communication staff clumsily spun his thanks as ironic.) Then, yesterday, he blamed “many sides” for the violence in Charlottesville. Violence that led to the death of a Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old local anti-racist demonstrator, and injured nineteen other anti-racist demonstrators. Violence by a twenty-year-old alt-right follower.

Many sides.

The Trumpster laid a generic “We’re in this together” message on us as his response to the incident. He offered no mention, no less critique, of the alt-right, white supremacists or, even, Nazis. He, instead, implied an equivalence: all sides are at fault, Nazis and anti-racist – the same, many sides.

So, why? Why’s Trump so quick to spread around the guilt regarding alt-right related violence, when he instantly attacks pretty must everything else that offends him. (Except for Vladimir, of course. That’s a special case.)

Perhaps, he’s not offended.

My compulsive counting of days since that fucking election has reached two-hundred-seventy-nine. It’s not even been a year, but feels like we’ve been dragged back to sixties, back to when racists wore their colors with impunity and hid behind monikers like John Birch or the American Independent Party rather than alt-right.

But, roses by another name…

The republic knows it’s no Summer of Love out there, but with protests erupting over issues thought settled back then, with our protracted foreign war and VA failing vets again, with political leadership pandering to the same, old white male, population as back then, it’s beginning to feel like a summer 1967 rerun.

And nineteen sixty-eight sucked,
osv