Taking This Country Back

Long before the current President-Elect came on the scene, Republicans habitually rallied to the dog whistle cry that, on its surface, expresses desire to “take their country back.”  And after that King of Bankruptcies did arrive and stated his intentions to run, bothersome as that slight inconvenience promised to be to him, I would have thought that by then that slogan would have gotten so stale that he would not have thought of resorting to it.

But those who flocked to his rallies as if bullpoop had never been identified and classified must never have heard that enjoinder, or, if they had, had not heard it repeated over and over again, ad infinitum and also ad nauseum.   Consequently those words became the leading slogan of his campaign and were emblazoned on red baseball caps and other screaming mimies galore.

“Let’s take our country back.”

To me the operative word there is “back,” though most others would choose the word “our” and its reference to the U.S. as being theirs and theirs alone, when in fact, while it may have been their place of residence,  it was and still is far from being theirs alone.   

The word “back,” as used in that slogan, could suggest two things.  One is that they are saying that the U.S. was once theirs but now it no longer is their country, which naturally means that they should leave.  Or the thinking, if any, is that they want to guide the country back to some former state of being or to some condition that is not at all to be desired, that is, to a state of backwardness.

That first usage immediately causes one to ask, “Take the country back from whom?  Who now has the U.S. in their possession?”

Obviously the reference must have been to undesirables who, for starters, didn’t look like these ball fans or go to the right churches on Sunday.

That intimation that the country had somehow slipped into the hands of  “tawny” and “black” others made no sense, because it was easily and totally refuted by a single, very short admonition.   “Look around.”    

By that I meant that merely glancing at photos of gatherings of those who occupied the halls of power in the U.S. prior to the recent elections would have revealed which group had the most hands on the levers and had never been pushed elsewhere.  The nation had not been taken at all, simply because it could not have been taken under the circumstances that prevailed in that period.

But now, after that election, things are very different, and, going by how some highly repellent forces are busy slithering into near total control of the U.S. government, it is quite true to say that the nation is in the process of being taken over, though not by Muslims, Mexicans, and others, but by the nitwits and the bigots in the baseball caps and their apologists.

As to where these people want to return this country and trump-dump it there, it’s hard to guess what’s going to happen, because those locations are too well-known, and mass human deportations and/or extinctions are too messy and also don’t figure to smell good.  In addition, hardly anyone wants to go back to any periods when I-phones did not exist.  No one.  That is because, ironically, instant evolution is already at work, and the drive toward simplifying us into one race and one only of crook-necked and eternally downward-staring catatonics is much too strong.