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 © 27 September 2020, the Griot Poet

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

 

-Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.”

“Platinum plans” for the black man,

After defending Confederate monuments,

Calling the birthplace of humanity,

A continent of shit hole countries,

After attacking the first black president

As illegitimate,

Promoting birtherism, demanding his birth certificate,

 

Short-form suddenly not enough: then demanding the long-form, then his Harvard grades,

Surreptitiously keeping decades of his income taxes,

Like his “great brain” grades

From scrutiny

By US citizens,

 

Putin has more insight to his net worth,

Than the rest of us,

Russian harlot pee tapes HAVE to exist,

Because of Billy Bush and Access Hollywood precedents,

 

What remains unprecedented,

Is how quickly

The party formerly of “family values,”

Capitulated,

To well-worn tropes and antecedents,

With a shoulder-shrug: eh!

 

They never really meant it.

White robes are substituted with red hats,

You see:

White supremacy is anxiously numerical.

The hysteria is clinical:

 

Mulatto children may be too ecumenical,

Looking for middle ground politically and spiritually less cynical,

 

Same-sex couples cannot make children,

Without biological insemination,

Of a surrogate,

No difference in outcomes seen between comparable parents,

 

They also must be blocked from adopting foster children,

Even though that will reduce the possibility of sexual exploitation and abuse,

Because what dismantles totalitarian rule,

Is “the threat of a good example,”

Counter to the propaganda narrative,

 

The GOP has conceded,

It is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a political party,

It is no longer competing,

To convince the electorate of anything, really.

 

They have no new ideas to motivate,

Newer generations of citizens,

Beyond the time-honored tropes of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and stupidity,

Beyond tax cuts for the wealthy,

And deregulation,

That will magically “trickledown”

To the rest of the nation,

 

The fact that it hasn’t,

Doesn’t matter,

Voter purges, voter suppression, polls closed on college campuses and neighborhoods of color,

Poll taxes on exonerated prisoners,

In Florida,

 

Their only motivation is to keep power,

By Malcolm X’s “any means necessary,”

Karl Rove wanted a “permanent Republican majority,”

Which sounded more like fascism than republican democracy,

 

Reducing The Constitution to a facade,

Apart from the ideal of its former self,

107 nations no longer welcome the citizens of the United States,

We’ve never been so isolated,

Think a minute,

Forget “again”:

How does our current state of affairs make us at ALL: great?