Dedicated to the Game

…and get ready to start yankin’…Wait, what are they doin’ back there?

Oh, that’s gotta hurt. No lube or nothin’.

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From the start of the current fiasco, two possibilities have existed. Either Trump meant that he subscribed to an authoritarian/fascist ideal (women in their proper roles, it’s fine for the state to torture individuals,  the National Identity is fixed and enforceable) or he calculated that enough people wanted to hear the language associated with fascism to get him what he wanted.

If you voted for this guy, you were either moved by that language, or you were willing to accept that language to get what you wanted (fags in their proper roles, enforcement of your religious preferences, suppression of alternative religious preferences, etc. whatever).

I want to be clear: I am not using fascism merely as an epithet. I am referring to its contents. Because fascism is the idea that the individual is feckless and decadent without a guiding star, and that the nation/state is meant to be that star. It is an idea which appeals to fear and weakness, especially fear and weakness caused by weariness. It doesn’t just get enforced from above. It needs the complicity of a large portion of the population.

That’s what the rest of us are pissed at: not Trump in himself, but your complicity.

And now, it is looking like that may be what’s left to be pissed about. Trump is showing some signs that he was delivering a calculated rather than a sincere appeal to fascist sentiments. Realpolitik, as advocated by Gingrich, may have been the program all along.

The Wall, mass deportation, and repeal and replace have been replaced by caveats, preparing the way for …whatever.

The current whatever looks to be folks like Ryan and Pence. These are the dingleberries  on the bung-hole of democracy. Objectivists at heart, their major concern is seeing Social Darwinism work out as they expect. For them, the nation/state is a farce, and an unnatural impediment to the natural forces (for Pence, natural forces ordained by the Lord) which sort the wheat from the chaff.

So get ready, because guess who these guys think are the chaff? It isn’t just black folks, who are obviously responsible for their own sad economic state because they haven’t been capable of working hard enough to transcend a few paltry centuries of enslavement, or illegal immigrants who obviously came here to sack this country by doing all our highly desirable agricultural work and then scurrying back to Mexico to live like kings on their ill-gotten profits.

Listen closely Trump voters, because Pence & Co. are about to tell you that it’s time to bend over, grab your bootstraps, and start yankin’. When you do, something else is going to happen – the same thing that has been happening.

When it happens again, I want you to think back to that Stones’ song that Trump’s campaign kept playing at his rallies: You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Sometimes, though, you don’t even get what you need. Sometimes, you get what you deserve.