Hail to the Thief

I haven’t turned on the radio, haven’t listened to NPR since November 9.

I won’t risk being in the same room with that voice — the convoluted blathering that makes Nicki Minaj lyrics sound like literature, the kind of yammering that torturers crank up and pipe into darkened cells to break shackled prisoners. I can’t stomach it — the butchered syntax, the prepubescent vocabulary, the oblique threats, the incessant self-congratulation, the bare-assed ignorance, the bald-faced lies.

I’ll have no truck with liars. Believe me. No F-150, Dodge Ram, or Mazda puddle-jumper. Our Border Patrol… endorsed me. No limo, El Camino, combustible Pinto, or Winnebago with liars. The murder rate’s the highest… in 47 years. I’ll have no Humvee, no dragster, no putt-putting John Deere. Nobody knew… healthcare could be so complicated. No buckboard, no surrey, no stagecoach or cutter with liars. A very smooth rollout of the travel ban. No van, no bike, no luge, tank, or trike. President Obama was tapping my phones. And I’ll have no crony-hauling golf cart with tremendous inflated liars. Believe me.

And when that greasy sound creeps through, it always dredges up the medicine-show huckster’s stump image: all sneering and puckered, thumb and finger pinched as if wielding a pin, as if with each crass word poking a cluster of glittered balloons and popping them one-by-one before finally exposing some dreamt-up buxom, blond stripper.

The drunken frat-boy chants. The manicured, cash-clenched fist. The red trucker’s cap to keep that bouffant from filling with wind and lifting like a sail or the fin on the back of some horny lizard. And that slogan. We know what “again” means and how far back we have to go to get to “again.” Before Roe and Boynton and Brown. Beyond Pine Ridge, Stonewall, Delano, and Birmingham. To back doors and alleys. Through riots and sit-ins. Beyond slums and ghettos and walls.

I loathe the thought of you representing us, being the face of our nation: all fat-lipped pout, cold shoulder to Merkel, bent over your knees as if bearing down on a commode, still distracted by that three-foot putt you missed on 18 last Saturday. Or conjuring up the 9.5 in the Miss Universe dressing room that you wanted to grab by the —.

You leech, you fungal hypocrite, you slogging nightmare, you illiterate money-grubber.

A few months ago I still felt hopeful. I actually had faith in the general goodness and intelligence of people despite the rancor of the campaign. I wasn’t so naïve as to think that we were free of racists, sexists, homophobes, anti-Semites, and Islamaphobes, but I trusted that the country was moving forward. I felt that my daughter, my students, and people generally were better educated, healthier, safer, and even wealthier than when I was growing up; that slowly but inevitably we might yet become “a more perfect Union”; and that “domestic Tranquility” wasn’t just the Founders’ pipedream.

No more.

Now I drink a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and wonder if next year I might not. I try to teach freshmen the logic of argumentation but fear that one day when I ask them to support their claims with evidence, someone will sneer, “Unfair” or “With what — fake news?” I consider putting a “No Ban. No Wall” sticker on the back window of my Jeep but suspect it could make me a target. I stand in my closet and hold the Red Army budenovka — a Soviet WWI-era woolen hat — that a Russian student gave me a few years ago as a gift and imagine mailing it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And now that I’m nearly sixty, I look at my retirement accounts and wonder if the billionaires in Washington and on Wall Street will drain it like they did in 2008.

You’re a stain on the country, you and your pack of dissemblers, enablers, and deniers. And when we’re through with you, when 140 characters aren’t enough, when your guilt and greed and conspiracy are published to the world, the icy fingers of the law will come for you, too.

Then, I’ll dust off hope. I’ll slowly get past these Nixonian flashbacks, and one sunlit morning in my quiet kitchen I’ll turn on the radio to the arresting news of your inevitable conviction.