Taking Liberty by James Howard Kunstler

You can see where this has been going. The wholesale un-personing of “powerful men” in the arts, media, and politics for sex “crimes” ranging from rape to stealing a kiss communicates a hunt up the food-chain that leads to the Golden Golem of Greatness tweeting his wicked id out in his White House lair. The barely suppressed thought behind all this is that Donald Trump raped America… and now he must be found guilty of it… and pay!

The Blue women of the land must surely think that, at least, he raped Hillary in the election, and as a pure metaphor that sort of works — recall how he loomed and ranged balefully behind her back during the candidates’ debates like some cartoon thug out of a Batman movie. If he didn’t actually rape her, he sure mugged her politically, but an awful lot of voters seemed to think she deserved it, arrogant, clueless, and deeply corrupt as she appeared down the homestretch. And the sneaky way he won! Stealing a few thousand votes here and there in deplorable flyover country, while Hillary slaughtered the Golem in the places that count: the cities of the left and right seacoasts.

Now that more than a score of male celebrities have been successfully liquidated, many for “offenses” committed decades ago — and many of them actual former darlings of the Left, sacrificed for the cause — the time is ripe to go in for the kill on Trump using the same tactic of sheer finger-pointing and shrieking until… something gives.

I’m not a Trump admirer, didn’t vote for the guy (nor Hillary, either), am not invested emotionally in his political survival, but I do have a pretty firm idea of what he represents: primitive maleness in all its lumbering vulgarity. I can see why he has a certain symbolic appeal in a society that increasingly shouts “men need not apply here.”

He also represents the widespread disappointment with the poor job that the remaining men in charge of things have done in recent decades caretaking this polity. They’ve managed to dodge the repair of every broken institution and duck engagement with any of the really scary problems facing citizens of this republic, from the gross disparities of wealth, to pervasive racketeering in health care and education, to our rotting infrastructure, to the quandaries of race, immigration, climate change — you name it and they have done squat.

Men mostly in charge of the FBI are currently busy demonstrating that they can completely botch the wished-for Trump-ending investigation of Russian “meddling and collusion” — whatever that is as a legal matter — under special prosecutor Robert Mueller. The agency begins to look like the brotherhood depicted on The Sopranos TV show some years back. The congressional committees (mostly men) with oversight on the FBI (and its umbrella agency, the Department of Justice) can’t even get a few deputy Attorneys General to answer a subpoena. If ever there was a display of feckless impotence, this is it.

The desperation to get rid of Trump by the Democratic Party and its handmaidens in the media has an odor of reckless dishonesty from a faction that succumbs more and more each day to the dangerous idea that the ends justify the means. Despite the momentary jubilation over the defeat of Roy Moore in the Alabama special election for senator, the party is close to committing suicide via the collective fantasy that all romantic gambits by men are always and everywhere a prelude to rape. But then, the Republican Party ought to be on suicide watch, too, as it debates a stupendously mendacious tax reform bill that will only shove the country closer to financial meltdown.

It will be interesting to see if the Blue ladies can work their sexual inquisition hoodoo successfully on Trump. So far, he seems like the proverbial immovable object, while the Blue ladies may only be an irresistible force in show business and the media, where mere accusation without due process avails to skewer their devils. Trump’s personal history as a rake on the New York nightlife scene is a trail as wide and open as Fifth Avenue. When the parade of “me too” witnesses commences, my guess is he’ll say, “sure, twenty-three years ago I squeezed her ass and grabbed her tit. So what…?” Men in many quarters will raise their fists and cry, “Right on.” And then what will Nancy Pelosi actually do?

I suspect the hysteria won’t out-live the financial hurricane that the nation is blundering into.

New Paintings by JHK 2016 — 2017