Satire/Frank Lingo

America’s Marriage On the Rocks

Columnists like to cite facts and research to persuade you to agree with us. But I won’t be doing much of that this time.

This column is about the pain I feel as a human being and as an American.

Also, I’m angry. Please indulge me while I get the name-calling off my chest. The President is a malignant narcissist, a psychotic fascist and a despicable prick.

There. Now I feel a little better.

But I still feel terrible for the state of the union. It hasn’t been this bad for at least 150 years. Starting a country, like we did over two centuries ago, is kind of like getting married at a young age. You join with the other states in beaming hope of what you can potentially become.

Now, granted, the Unites States was founded as a rebound relationship. We came out of a forced marriage where we had suffered from a controlling and abusive spouse.

So we jumped impulsively at the chance for something better. And it was better, even though still heavily skewed in favor of white male landowners.

But our wedding vows, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, aspired eloquently to a more equitable union for all the participants, in stark contrast to the reality which was still brutal, especially for Blacks, Native Americans and women.

So we stayed together, begat offspring states and stumbled along for the next 80 years. We hung together, despite our union committing atrocities like the War of 1812 and the Mexican War in the 1840s. But we justified our greed of trying to annex Canada and stealing much of Mexico by proclaiming it was our destiny.

Then in 1861, 11 of our spouses filed for divorce and took off on their own, because they feared the others would stop them from owning humans. It was not an amicable asundering. The remaining spouses took extreme exception to being left and decided they would rather kill the fleeing spouses than make do without them.

This was the worst divorce ever. Four years later, with mountains of dead bodies around us, we got them back at gunpoint and remarried. And we all lived happily ever after.

Ha ha. So, OK, our states have had a rocky marriage all along. What happens in any relationship is subjective and depends on whose story you believe.

Whose story you believe. Isn’t that the key part of any political movement, and any divorce case that goes to court?

Civility has often been absent in our discourse. There have been fights in the halls of Congress. Actual fistfights. In one 1858 melee, Rep. Cadwallader Washburn ripped the hairpiece off another member. OK, I cited this because it’s funny to mention a guy named Cadwallader. Also, it’s a good precedent. Wouldn’t it be swell to see someone rip that ridiculous blonde wig off our Oaf of Office?

This brings us to our current chaos, courtesy of our Con-mander in Chief. Sure, we’ve had bad presidents before. Nixon was a rotten creep and Watergate was the least of his crimes. Tricky Dick prolonged the Vietnam War and caused the deaths of millions. Lyndon Johnson was also a war criminal, despite his good work for civil rights. George W. Bush lied about the reason to invade Iraq, a crime that keeps causing mayhem 17 years later.

Yet, as bad as those guys were, they pale in comparison to Putin’s puppet president. Lest we forget, Russia is our union’s enemy. Almost a century ago, Russia had forced 14 countries into a bad marriage — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Every word in that title was a lie. It wasn’t a union, it was an empire run by Russia for nearly 70 years. It wasn’t soviet, because there were no properly elected officials. It wasn’t socialist — its citizens enjoyed no benefits from owning means of production. Finally, the other members were enslaved states — not autonomous, as republics should be.

But Putin, a former enforcer for the Russian secret police, thinks of the USSR as the good old days. He has made himself dictator for life while becoming one of the world’s richest men. Now he wants control of the United States.

How did Putin put our president in his pocket? Putin convinced his money-laundering friends at Germany’s DeutscheBank to lend our pussy-grabber hundreds of millions of dollars. No other bank in the world would lend him a dime due to his multiple bankruptcies.

Following Putin’s playbook, we have been subjected to terrible behavior for four years. We’ve had child abuse with immigrant babies stolen from their mothers. We have seen cheating in our elections by a foreign enemy to install their traitorous agent. And this year, we’ve had disinformation to placate his base instead of presidential responsibility in the midst of a deadly virus.

To know what our union has become leaves millions of us with broken hearts. The uplifting potential at our country’s founding has sunk into acrimonious action. Our co-equal Congress has too may enablers giddily guiding us toward a dictatorship, even if a facade of representative democracy remains.

The only hope to rescue us is the vote. Despite all their suppression and sabotage, we can’t let them destroy our national marriage. Let’s save it for the sake of the children.

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote” (read an except at EarthVote.world. Email: lingofrank@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2020

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