11/11/2024

Warning: Strong Language

It’s been a week since the Orange Turd got elected- ELECTED – as #47 south of the border. The Stupid is indeed strong.

I don’t know who or what I fear most – Trump and his coterie of fascists or the 70+ million voters who decided that a convicted insurrectionist and lying, thieving fraud and philanderer would be a good choice for someone to lead their country and be an example for their young people.

Don’t get me started on either the media’s kneeling to their billionaire owners or the conservative-evangelical biblefuckers who think this putrid piece of ambulatory faecal matter is the American deity’s answer to their misbegotten prayers.

I think it will take me more than a week to process this catastrophe, this collapse, decades in the making, of an entire educational, civic, social, and political system. And I don’t think for a moment this hasn’t leaked north of that so-called peaceful and defenceless border.

Yet yesterday was Remembrance Day. I remember my parents were kids.

Preteens:

– when my mother and her family were hauled into the concentration camps of the Japanese Empire in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies in its last gasps of frothy colonial blood;

– when my father and his eleven siblings survived the Nazi occupation and that horrific final 1944/45 winter of the Grote Honger when over 10,000 Dutch men, women, and children starved to death, and his hometown of Nijkerk was artilleried into dust and rubble.

They might have emigrated to Canada eight years later, but they never outran the images, sounds, and smells of brutality, bodies, and blood seared into their teenage brains.

My mother and father, parents of two sons and a daughter died thirty years apart, terrified and alone. We feel that in our bones.

And I watch what is happening south of us and I ask,

“Again?”

The song “Prophet’s Yesterday” I wrote seven years ago to paint my feelings about the first Trump misadventure was something I thought might be dated by the time the album showed up in 2020.

I was wrong.