When You're A Con, You're A Con All The Way

I don't know how many Trump supporters read this blog. If they do, after everything I've said, they're probably really nice people. And I know there are really nice people who support Trump. Those are the people I'd like a word with. I won't yell, I promise.

I know you're out there. You voted for him, but if we ask you what you think of his behavior or demeanor, you cringe. You wish he weren't quite so crude; you wish a lot of things were different about him, but you believe with all your heart that he is on your side, and if everyone just gave him a chance, he'd make a big difference in your lives. He's a tough-talker, he's rich, he must know what he's doing. So if some of us worry about his careless and bellicose approach to the world, well? Maybe he'll shake things up by forgoing diplomacy. Maybe diplomacy is for losers. Maybe the guy with the tough talk will win it all for us. And if nation after nation loses respect for us, well, maybe they're the ones that are wrong, and we're better off on our own, and it just goes to show how special we are. And maybe all politicians are alike. They all make mistakes and say stupid things, so we should give this one a pass.

But he's shown us who he is all along. The man who mocked the disabled reporter, the man who put a photo of his wife next to Ted Cruz's plainer wife and considered it a campaign poster, the man who boasted about his dick during a televised debate, the man who demeaned his opponent Carly Fiorina by saying "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?"--the man who, for God's sake, took the basest, most overtly racist lies about Obama and threw fuel on them, for years, for years, knowing they're not true, the man who uses coy innuendo to plant lies, smear opponents, and inflame mobs, that is who he is. And yet so many of you hope he will somehow come through for you that you keep quiet, and wince a little, and even pretend that you don't hear Nazis and white supremacists chanting his name--because that doesn't have anything to do with you, does it? They've got the right. It's a free country.

I don't know. Maybe your only news source is the one manufacturing "news" straight out of a think tank funded by billionaires for their own purposes. Maybe you buy into the bullshit memes the Macedonians and Russians have been putting out. Maybe you help them go viral because they confirm what you already believe. Maybe you believe everything you hear.

Maybe you believe Trump was the only one who cared about you. Maybe you think that other party, the one that tried to get you affordable health care and equal pay and protect your water and air, was filled with snobs who thought they were better than you. Maybe you think this guy'll bring your job back, or bring your medical premiums down, or stop all the brown people he's instructed you to hate from coming into the country. But he won't.  

He has no idea what to do about health care other than tear down the previous compromise with nothing to replace it. When it doesn't work, he'll blame the Democrats for obstructing him, because that always worked before. You bought it before.

Here's what he has done. He's given you a tiny temporary tax cut and cut billions of tax dollars on corporations and the rich permanently. In a country with the most powerful military in the world that can't even provide clean water for its citizens and insists on a $7.25 minimum wage, he's put 700 billion dollars into the military. He's ripped up environmental safeguards that were already inadequate so that fossil fuel corporations and their shareholders can keep racking up profits, while hoping you all are still watching the actors on the "news" channel who are being paid to tell you climate change science is controversial. When we must be going all in on innovation in new energy and a sustainable future--one might say any future at all--he's barreling straight into the past on the fastest coal train he can find.

You're being played. He doesn't care about you. He just wants your vote. He'll tell you migrant workers and asylum seekers and Muslims and black men kneeling are your enemies, because he knows people with enemies can be talked into anything, and then he'll promise to protect you, to get your vote. He'll pretend he gives a damn about abortion to get your vote. He'll tell you four conflicting things about gun control so that you can pick the one you like and choose to believe that's the one he believes, too. And get your vote.

He'll make sure the violent MS-13 gang, which has operated on both sides of the border and internationally since the 1980s, remains on the front page, because he wants you to associate the gang with brown people, so he can sell you a big, beautiful, useless, 18-billion-dollar wall, while our own infrastructure is crumbling. And he wants you to worry about that gang every day, so you won't notice his own gang is dismantling the middle class and throwing the poor into the river to enrich the super-wealthy. His gang. The one that's rushing to tear down the protections put in place for you after the financial meltdown of 2008. Because the financial sector--a.k.a. "the swamp"--has long since made off with your pension and benefits and transferred your wealth to the wealthier, and they're eager to do it again as soon as Trump and his gang of Republicans gut the restraints. He is ballooning the deficit and debt. He's proposing billions of dollars of cuts to your Social Security and Medicare. He told you he had a 1.5-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan for you but asked for only 200 billion in his budget--after cutting existing infrastructure programs by the very same amount. Did you notice?

It's a con. He doesn't care about you at all. He cares about himself, he cares about money, and maybe he cares about his daughter, the sexier one. He doesn't give a damn about you. He wants your vote so he can continue to rake it in. To privatize public assets for profit. To deregulate for profit. To destroy unions for profit. That profit is not for you. It's for the super-wealthy. Look at that bad, brown gang over there, this man says; don't look at mine.

Does he believe what his Nazi admirers believe? I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe he's not that guy. Maybe he doesn't care about Nazis any more than he cares about anybody else. He damn sure doesn't care about you.

Knowledge In Retrograde

The Great Pootini

The other day my friend Dale made an announcement on Facebook. He said "nobody needs to know what I think about 'Mercury in retrograde.'" He typed it emphatically, you could just tell.  It's not always easy to judge these things in the digital world, but I believe he was taking a tone.

Dale and I are compatible spirits. We're not entirely alike of course. He tends toward melancholy, and I toward alcoholy. But I thought it was likely that if nobody needed to know what he thinks about Mercury in retrograde, maybe nobody needed to know what I think about it either. Which means I have to go look it up again so that I remember what I think about it. I try to keep a tidy house in my head and that means I maintain a running fire sale on thoughts that I haven't used in a few years.

So I looked it up. If a planet is in retrograde, it means it looks like it's going backwards from the vantage point of us on Earth. It's not going backwards. It's going the same direction as it always has. It's just an illusion brought about because the planets take different amounts of time to orbit the sun and they do a little leap-frogging. Shepherds who spent one heck of a lot of time under the stars noticed that the planets seemed to go astray every so often and, not having a clear grip on what was actually going on, began to read a lot into it. Maybe they fell into some hard times and squinted up at the planet backing up and thought: huh. We should probably be more cautious whenever that happens. And a whole network of observations and associations built up around these things and got passed down. It's like thinking your team loses when you forget to wear your lucky shirt, only bigger, inasmuch as it involves everybody and the whole solar system and all.

Thousands of years later when we're sophisticated enough to land a golf cart on a particular plain on Mars, people still figure the shepherds were probably on to something.

So I don't have the particulars, but you're supposed to approach decisions in your own life in specific ways whenever it looks kind of like the planets are going to backwards even though they're not. Like, right now Mercury is in retrograde. It's in retrograde an average of three times a year, so you have to stay on top of it. When Mercury is in retrograde, you might need to plan more carefully. With proper knowledge of your star charts, you would know when to plan for more spontaneity, say. And everyone isn't affected the same way. It depends on when you, personally, first presented your slimy self to the outside air. If you're a November baby, you might have to conduct yourself in a whole different way from a spring hatchling.

Which means my parents changed everything for me when they had me induced two weeks early. The effect that Mercury has on me as it trundles predictably around the sun but appears to be going backwards might be entirely different than it could have been, all because of parental fatigue and a  Pitocin drip.

If I do want to know what it is I should be doing, or doing differently, as a result of these celestial illusions, there's an astrologer in the neighborhood I can consult. Scoff if you will, but she's got powers. She gets bigger every time she approaches me and smaller when she leaves. Swear to Jupiter.