Essay: An Inauguration that Befouls the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday

 An Inauguration that Befouls and Defiles the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday

A theme on this blog over the years is that the United States is poised to become the shortest-lived dominant Empire in Western history.  It might be the shortest lived empire in all human history,  Full disclosure:  I am not an historian and my reference base is only the Roman, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and English empires, all of which owned the global stage for significant stretches.  According to Wikipedia, England was the “foremost global power” for about century.  One could argue that the US became the dominant empire after WWII, when the previous great empires slaughtered themselves into subordination in an orgy of stupidity, violence, cruelty and greed.  For the US empire to exceed Britain’s reign, it would have to endure until the year 2045, which marks a century since the end of WWII.  But such endurance is highly unlikely.

 

The primary reason is the country’s internal rot, its extreme corruption.  On that front, we can apply the classic saying:  the fish rots from the head.

 

11/5 was one of the worst days in the history of human civilization.  On November 5, 2024, a fascist dictator Donald Trump took the White House in the United States.  It was a close election, and though America deserves to be condemned for its cruelty and vice, which I will get into below, I want to point out, underscore even, that 48% of voters backed Kamala Harris, a Black and Indian woman who deeply believes in human rights.  The election of Harris would have put a major dent in 12,000 years of patriarchy and, as well, over four hundred years of American racism and misogyny. 

If Harris had won, the maturity of the collective consciousness of the human species would have continued.  Or ethics technology would have advanced and we would have had a better chance of escaping the petty, insecure warlordism that has reigned for millennia.

 

Speaking as a US citizen myself, tens of millions of us are truly horrified by what happened on 11/5.

 

Now, though I dread to write about it, onward to the awful topic.  Today Trump is inaugurated as President, an act that befouls and defiles the other meaning of this date:  a national holiday to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.

 

A Defining Moment

 

The majority of US voters went for Donald Trump, a man who has been found liable for rape in civil court, and accused by over twenty women of sexual assault; a man who has been caught on tape saying that he could “just grab them by the pussy” and get away with it; a man who has been found guilty of 34 felonies; and who has been indicted on charges of treason in federal court, and who was in the process of being tried for them; a man who had been publicly diagnosed by dozens of professional psychologists and psychiatrists as both a psychopath and a narcissist; and a man who, for all his life, reveled in multiple vices, suffered six bankruptcies, and who earned money, not from business acumen, but as an actor in a TV show who played merely what he is:  a meretricious paragon of vanity, insecurity, falsehoods, and greed. 

 

The racist, sexist Trump does excel as a con man.  He has plied cult-level demagoguery, to amass a cult-base constituency of people who worship him.  Copying the classic tactics of tyranny, he proclaims that outside of his base are the enemy who deserve hate and who need to destroyed. 

 

And so the noble momentum in the US for true equality--for people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community, has been shattered by a fierce, violent backlash of willful, gaslit ignorance.  Trump’s followers sacrifice their own health and financial well-being, the very stability of their own country, for one essential purpose:  to maintain what Isobel Wilkerson rightly calls the American caste system---more simply, traditional White macho patriarchy. 

 

Will Trump fix America’s corrupt healthcare system?  No.  Will he end the financial imbalance that hands a tenth of a percent of the population 90% of the country’s wealth?  No.  And yet he will ensure White male rule.  This includes, as it always has, a system of rewards for women and people of color who accept and serve the White patriarchy, granting them perks over those who refuse to bow.

 

Dredging up the words of Lyndon Johnson, the 36th President of the USA:

 

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-immigration-white-supremacy.html

 

Adding more context, the United States is a country that only a hundred and sixty years ago fought a five-year Civil War because the Southern White patriarchy refused to give up its Black slaves.  After the South lost the war, they hated the North with pure, raw passion.

 

Here are the lyrics of the song, Good Ol’ Rebel Soldier, written right after the Civil War:

 

Oh, I'm a good old Rebel soldier, now that's just what I am;
For this "Fair Land of Freedom" I do not give a damn!
I'm glad I fit against it, I only wish we'd won,
And I don't want no pardon for anything I done.

 

I hates the Constitution, this "Great Republic," too!
I hates the Freedman's Bureau and uniforms of blue!
I hates the nasty eagle with all its brags and fuss,
And the lying, thieving Yankees, I hates 'em wuss and wuss!

 

I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do,
I hates the Declaration of Independence, too!
I hates the "Glorious Union" -- 'tis dripping with our blood,
And I hates their striped banner, and I fit it all I could.

 

I followed old Marse Robert for four years, near about,
Got wounded in three places, and starved at Point Lookout.
I cotched the "roomatism" a'campin' in the snow,
But I killed a chance o' Yankees, and I'd like to kill some mo'!

 

Three hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust!
We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot,
But I wish we'd got three million instead of what we got.

 

I can't take up my musket and fight 'em now no more,
But I ain't a'gonna love 'em, now that's for sartain sure!
I do not want no pardon for what I was and am,
And I won't be reconstructed, and I do not care a damn!

 

 

This attitude of hate extended to stubborn, vicious embrace of the idea that slavery was absolutely fine.   Perhaps, at some point, the South let go of the idea of Black slavery.  I’m not really sure it has frankly, speaking as a White person myself, whose ancestry is Southern and goes back many generations.  My ancestors owned slaves. 

 

Nevertheless, this is certain:  a virulent racism plagues the USA; and alongside it a great hatred, embedded in White culture, for anyone who dares challenge it.  Racism hides these days behind a mask of deceit.  Since the Civil Rights Movement, it has become the norm, even in the South, to deny in word that racism is acceptable (Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!) even as it is advanced in subterfuge and deed. 

 

In back rooms, no doubt, the ‘N-word’ continues to be used in full contempt and rage.  My grandmother used it all the time and frequently went on rants.  “Bean, those N-s are smart,” which was the beginning of a long tirade against Black people.  “Bean” was my nickname as a child.

 

Such is the ‘United’ States.  Infected with bigotry, misogyny and homophobia.  White “Manifest Destiny” learned early on--in its genocide of Native Peoples, in its use of Black slavery to build the country--that violence and evil of Darkness can win out over the Light.

 

And now, in the form of Trump, Darkness has won control of the soul of America.  Darkness was wrested control from America’s other wonderful side, the one that brought us the first Black President in Barack Obama, the one that championed the rights of women to vote in 1920; and continues to advance the rights of women and LGBTQ people. 

 

Darkness has won.  I don’t know if the war is completely over, but it could be.  Why?  Because physical violence is an extremely effective tool of social control; and Trump has the military and the police under his authority.  Trump also has power to inflict heavy economic damage in the form of lawsuits, the outcome of which will likely be determined by judges in his thrall.

Battered on decades of consumerism, with all its petty, shallow vanities and insecurities, the American people have little ethical backbone.  We have been trained to be materialistic and needy, not willing to fight for anything higher, such as Justice, only to obey and lap up frivolous gifts, perks, discounts, coupons, sales--on and on, as we are commercial-whipped to rush to get cheaper products and show them off with vulgar zeal.  If our neighbor has some socially invented status symbol that we don’t have, we fret and pout, never thinking about the deeper levels of life, only the validation of our own voracious, product-hungry ego.

 

Maybe, if we are lucky, the American people still possess the seeds of righteous determination, and can rise up from this ‘rock bottom’ place. 

But it would be absurd not to consider the likelihood that the USA, with its mightiest military on the planet, under the impetuous and mercurial control of a narcissistic psychopath, will not now spread forth its Dark Shadow to encompass and devour as much as it can, along vectors of greed, power-lust, malevolence and malignancy.

 

=================