Standing in line at a store the other day, I was nearly overcome by a malingering stench. I glanced around, sniffing.
I couldn’t tell where the smell was coming from.
An older woman in front of me, sixty-something, hair bleached blonde and lips botoxed to the max, was waiting with aspirin. In front of her was a beefy, white dullard wearing a MAGA hat gleaming crisply over narrow, beady eyes was sorting through coupons for a purchase of Dude wipes in front a Black, female cashier.
I sighed, impatiently.
Trump made America grate, that was for sure.
Maybe Americans—their gullibility and childish naivete—had long been grating, but now the predicament was Orwellian. Except Big Brother couldn’t just surveil you. He could rape your sister (or daughter), mow down dissidents with his King Ranch pick-up and execute Black and Brown people on sight. And all this while tainting public lands, tapping civic coffers (for testosteronal spandex spectacles on the White House lawn), poisoning and decimating public water supplies, defunding public health institutions (like the Center for Disease Control), appointing obsequious fops to serious policy departments and staging military flops that endanger (or clearly demonstrate, ouch) our current standing in the world.
These United States are a regressive shitshow. Donald Trump has reduced this country to a Turd Reich.
And that smell?
That’s Uncle Sam.
That olfactory affront?
That’s us.
The recent explosive diarrhea outbreak is the perfect metaphor for what America has become, and here in Texas, it’s much worse. Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton and Dan Patrick are human strains of projectile diarrhea, which Lone Star conservatives fecklessly extrude on everything meaningful and worthwhile. Abbott and the raw orifice that is the current Texas Legislature have shat on women, education, environmentalism, natural resources, free speech, due process, equal representation, voting rights, immigrants, the middle class, affordable healthcare—you name it., they deface it.
If it’s good and/or reasonable for Texans—and, by that, I mean all Texans . . . not just white chauvinists, the dollar aristocracy, robber barons, rabid ranchers, oil and gas fascists, or Apartheid trillionaires–Abbott, Paxton and Patrick, et al—ceremoniously drop trou and “Damn the torpedos!”
(Pardon the previous pun, but their political alliances and asinine policy have relegated us to a malingering torpor and their party is beholden to pedos.).
The Turd Reich is upon us. The Turd Reich is far from throwing in the towel. The Turd Reich’s platform is a nod to latent coprophilia, and it’s jammed up the bowels of the Republic.
There’s no easy fix.
We need real political change.
We need a more informed—not disinformed—electorate.
We need serious public education—not spurious private miseducation.
This is obviously still America, so folks are still permitted to behave and vote as stupidly and selfishly as they like. But none of us should delude ourselves.
If you have no problem with piggish politics, priggish, phony self-righteousness, and the increasingly pervasive, unprecedented stink, keep dousing yourself in eau de idiot. There will never be enough to disguise your idiocy.
The wreak comes from within.
We stink because we don’t think. Especially for ourselves.
Especially of others.
Our rank and file is rank and foul.
The majority of our elected officials are only effective in urinals.
Texas wreaks of Red State mistakes and we may already have let them seal our fate.
They’re making this country indefensible and this planet unlivable.
Wrinkling our nose isn’t enough.
South Park infamously iterated and reiterated that Trump’s former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had excrement on her nose. Funny, accurate stuff, sure—but we all do.
Every minute of every day.
The Turd Reich isn’t just a bad vote, a crude cult or a deplorable majority’s only-choice, lesser-evilism. It is willful degradation.
It is political, psychological defecation on a national and international stage.
And the lone star didn’t even bother to wipe.