DONALD TRUMP : THE BELL WEATHER WHO HAS GIVEN VOICE TO A MULTITUDE OF HERETOFORE UNSPOKEN AND TABOO GRIEVANCES OF AMERICANS WHICH, IN THE POSTMODERN, POST-INDUSTRIAL SECULAR PROGRESSIVE WORLD OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND ‘REVERSE PROGRESSIVE TYRANNY’, HAS TOUCHED OFF A POWDER KEG OF HOT BUTTON ISSUES IN AMERICA’S ONGOING LITANY OF ‘CULTURE KAMPF.’
As America’s ‘election year’ gears up into its full apoplectic swing of pathological muckraking, finger-pointing and corporately-financed character assassination strategies, courtesy of unbridled Super Pac slush funds, one man stands head and shoulders above all the rest in this emerging dramaturgical tragicomedy we call American democracy: Donald Trump.
‘The Donald’, as he is affectionately called by friend and foe alike, started out this race almost evoking a reaction on both sides of the 49th parallel of ‘no, you’re not serious, he’s not actually going to run for President is he?’ Then the news reports started to get more serious and people actually started sitting up and taking notice of this seemingly burlesque-like comical shoot-from-the hip, unscripted, off the cuff, extemporaneous, multimillionaire reality show host and real estate tycoon, who was now swaggering into the proverbial macrocosm of Tombstone USA, putatively projecting his Wyatt Earp persona whilst deliberately and amply shooting off his buccal six shooter from the hip at anything and anyone who moved into his peripheral field of political scrutiny, including Pope Francis.
What started out as something of a bad joke all of a sudden got serious really fast. Pundits on both the left and right started falling all over themselves either vilifying or lauding this outlandish and colourful man who has since the moment he threw his hat into the ring, has got every American journalist and average citizen hanging on his every word, as if his extemporaneous ‘Trumpisms’ and off colour, off the cuff remarks were now being elevated to the level of instantaneous doggerel dogma.
But you know something? Donald Trump has got people everywhere talking about politics and talking about the tough issues in ways which nobody up until now dared to broach such issues for fear of breaching some unwritten and/or unspoken protocol of secular progressive political correctness regarding issues which many people in the western world had up until recently grown, through ideological creeping accretion and evolution of so-called ‘progressive’ sentiment and the unspoken and supposedly universally accepted conventional wisdom of secular progressive socio-political and socio-cultural dogma, to believe were ‘untouchable’ subjects which were no longer acceptable to discuss freely and openly in the public forum.
This ‘reverse’ form of ‘secular progressive tyranny’ had up until Trump’s arrival on the scene, given rise to a growing feeling among many Americans and Canadians, of being censured and having their fundamental freedoms of expression and free speech curtailed, even extinguished by a secular progressive left wing element within North American society, whose self-appointed appropriation of the socio-cultural and socio-political definitions of what was to be considered ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ during that crucial period of social effervescence of the 1967 to 1979 era, led the left down the road of hubris and misappropriation and even abuse of power, in their well-intentioned desire to create a more just and equitable, and progressive society.
What it has left us with is a legacy of left wing secular tyranny in the realm of race relations, immigration, religious discourse, gender relations, and the economy. This is why Trump is truly a game changer. Many may accuse him of being ‘scary’ and ‘misogynous’, but I think that after eight years of a very urbane, articulate, erudite, African-American Liberal President, what America needs is a real ‘shoot from the hip’, plain speaking, extemporaneous, and politically incorrect white guy who will give a voice and put flesh on the bones to a whole host of deep-seated grievances which many Americans, not just white conservatives, have been harbouring for several decades.
Americans want concrete action concerning their southern border. Neither President Obama nor the Congress has proposed, much less implemented measures to stanch the flow of illegal Mexican immigrants to the USA. Walls have been built in days of yore: The Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, as well as a wall separating the French from the Bretons. In more recent memory we have had the Berlin Wall.
Any future US President might also wish to examine the agricultural policies of the US Congress regarding corn subsidies. Just as America brought Castro’s Cuba and its missiles upon itself by backing a proto fascist right wing, corporately financed military dictatorship, so too has America’s Congressional subsidization of Midwestern corn producers resulted in massive amounts of unrealistically low-priced American corn being exported to Mexico, where it has had a devastating effect on thousands of small Mexican subsistence corn producers, effectively running them out of business and uprooting them off their land, thereby making them into landless labourers, who ironically, see their only salvation from the scourge of destitution and poverty, being making the perilous, illegal trek over the border into America, the country whose perverse agro-industrial policies have been responsible for their descent into destitution to begin with.
So wall or no wall, any future President of the USA will have to take a tough look at the USA’s own stance on domestic and international policies to determine what the most correct course of action will be to take to rectify the situation. The same goes for race relations and the economy. More blacks are getting killed by white police officers because the economy is in rough shape in the US and generations of racial segregation, despite efforts to dismantle it, have left African Americans further and further in a state of destitution and poverty, with many not feeling inclined to want to comply or even conform to the existing American power structure, because it is so thoroughly biased against them regarding access to employment, housing, education, health care and so on, that many have just given up and have descended into a sullen state of passive-aggression, and often are provoked into furious rage when one of their own is senselessly gunned down in a racially motivated incident.
Donald Trump, if elected, will have to do far more than talk big and espouse grandiose and radically aggressive solutions such as building walls and deporting people. He will have to address the structural root cause of the culture wars in America, which is social and economic injustice. If Donald Trump can get all Americans working again, and not just some, and have the work equally spread out across the country with good salaries which give Americans something to hope for instead of something to continue to fight amongst themselves over, then he might actually go down in history as the postmodern Wyatt Earp who brought peace to Tombstone USA and didn’t actually have to have a gunfight at the OK Corral, because he will have rallied all the citizens of Tombstone to the common purpose of engaging themselves once again in productive labour, to build a country worthy of the slogan ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ I wish him well. God bless America.
P E T E R S T U A R T . CA 
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