There has never been anything so sordid in American history as the Trump presidency, which has now given us the squalid exhibition of the Kavanaugh nomination. There is not enough disinfectant in the world to clean the mess made of the nation. But you know that. You also know you detest those mobs at his rallies. But there’s this.
There is this revelation that crystallized for me looking at clips from Trump’s rally two nights ago as I have encountered them on TV or on-line.
The revelation is who his crowd is, what it is.
It’s a lynch mob.
Ever seen grainy old films of mobs gathering by the thousands to watch a lynching?
Bringing picnic lunches to munch on fried chicken, potato salad and pie while they watched a black man burn alive?
Bringing their children to those murderous, murdering festivals of hate? Putting the children on their shoulders to get a better view of the victim?
Posing with wide grins with their children alongside the hung and burned corpses of black men?
Celebrating their peculiar, indecent harvest of “Strange fruit hanging from a southern tree”?
A Trump rally is exactly that. It is a lynching.
Now they hold the lynchings in auditoriums and arenas. The lynching is not at the end of a rope.
It is verbal and figurative but the crowds are the same lynch mobs — white, smarmy self-righteousness, faces distorted by rage, by hate by fear of the other; hearing words of mockery, words uttered with sheer violence, indecent words, infused with raw, visceral race and gender hate.
It has set us back 100 years to the time when lynchings happened all the time — yes predominantly in the south but not necessarily just the south. It is said over time there were 4,000 victims. That may the least number it could have been.
But now this and this — this is the first and needs to be the last time in American life and history that a president leads, uses and gins up lynch mobs.
And if — if he sends them into the streets, will they go. Yes, they will.
One of the real truths that goes unspoken in this is very simple. Like lynchings, Trump rallies are first and foremost a primal scream by failed white men in the United States and by the women entrapped in their failed lives. And the children you see in the screen shots? Well, see above.
The sad and real truth is this: If you are a white man in this country and you have failed — if you are a failure — you can if you choose, and they do choose — blame it on this, that and the other thing, on lots of other people, on lots of other kinds of people.
But the truth?
The truth is the only person responsible is the one they see in the mirror. Being part of a lynch mob can’t, won’t and doesn’t change that. It is not elevating, it is not admirable. It is all the nasty things it is.
For now, this spasm of national hate contorts the national soul. It will end, these things do, leaving behind much damage.
When it ends, it will recede into the background story, a sordid chapter co-joined in our history with Jim Crow, with lynchings and mobbery.
Peeling the Onion 
Excellent piece, Carl. All extremely sad, but true. I hope we all live to see the end of this horror.
Karen
On Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 10:10 AM Peeling the Onion wrote:
> carlzeitz posted: ” There has never been anything so sordid in American > history as the Trump presidency, which has not given us the squalid > exhibition of the Kavanaugh nomination. There is not enough disinfectant in > the world to clean the mess made of the nation. But you kn” >
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I went to Whole Foods this morning and as I was checking out I ignorantly asked the checkout clerk if he was from Iran. He said he was from Nepal and spoke perfect English. I said “Welcome to America,” and he said no one else had said that to him. Even here in liberal Reston, a woman I know at the YMCA, who is from Iraq, told me that an old white woman in the sauna told her to go back to her own country. This is all the fault of Trump who encourages racism and hate.
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