Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair – Photo by Martin Falbisnor
“Someone,” my Finnish-American socialist great-aunt Mary used to say in the late 1960s, “ought to teach these assholes a lesson.” By “these assholes,” she meant the people who own and run the United States.
Mary died many years ago. I thought about her the other night while watching Donald Trump lie about crime and border walls to an audience of frothing white-nationalist Amerikaners in El Paso. I wondered what she’d think about the American political circus these days.
I imagined her yesterday laughing with disdain as the orange monstrosity idiotically declared a national emergency. There is no national emergency at the southern border just a humanitarian crisis created by its own fascist nativism.
For the Ruling Class Because in the Ruling Class
Who would Mary want taught a lesson in 2019? Trump, of course, for starters. Aunt Mary would have loathed the tangerine truth-crusher with a passion. She would have been appalled by the callousness with which the billionaire creeping fascist president cut pay and benefits for 800,000 federal workers for five weeks in pursuit of a nativist wall meant to counter a fake brown menace on the southern border.
Mary would despise the modern-day Republicans for playing along with Trump’s racist, sexist, and authoritarian games and for giving the super-rich and their corporations a big tax cut in a country where the top tenth of the upper One Percent…