He Will Crush ISIS by First Attacking a Gold Star Mother

     For several days I've wanted to write something in this blog, but a simultaneous desire to not comment for a while on my nation's political schizophrenia overtook me, so I left town for the weekend, read a Nabokov novel (Glory), and watched several hours of The X Files.
     In Philadelphia, the Democratic National Convention last week looked like it was produced by professionals, a striking contrast to the previous week's Republican clown show in Cleveland.  Trump, who boasted in advance about how extraordinary the Cleveland show would be, afterwards distanced himself from the Convention (a week-long fear-based bitch-fest sloppily put together with an overarching doom message).  Trump, clearly, was embarrassed by how it turned out.  He had much to do with its result, of course, since so many GOP bright lights didn't show, and it's difficult to find Hollywood luminaries willing to come out as Republicans.  The danger in doing so, as Scott Baio and Antonio Sabato, Jr. proved, is in being provided a forum to air the kinds of views heard from the mouths of callers on Rush Limbaugh's radio show.  Sabato, interviewed by ABC after his Convention speech, insisted Barack Obama is a Muslim.  "Barack Obama," Sabato said, doesn't sound like "a Christian name."
     Would he say the same of Ishoa?  I don't know, but judging from Sabato's demonstrated level of intellect, I suspect he would insist Ishoa is also not a Christian name, even though that's the actual Aramaic name of the founder of Sabato's religion.
     Sabato's argument smacks of foreigner-fear.  I guess that Italian ancestry is in the clear as far as he's concerned, and Scott Baio is as American and Christian as George Patton's dick.
     One of my gripes against Trump has to do with his spoiling of political discourse in America.  Not that it was intelligent before he came along; now, though, it's utterly inane.  Moe Howard hitting Curly on the head with a wrench conveys more directly expressed intellectual depth than most of what I hear on cable news whenever hosts, hostesses, and guests discuss Donald Trump with Trump's mouthpieces, or, as they're usually called, surrogates.
     Last Thursday, the final night of the Democratic National Convention, when Hillary Clinton appeared on stage to accept the cheers, another speaker, accompanied by his wife, who didn't speak, made the biggest impact of all.  Mr. and Mrs. Khan are the parents of an Army captain killed in the War on Terror.  They, and their late son, are Muslims, originally from Pakistan.  Under Donald Trump's draconian ideals, they would not have been able to enter the United States.
     Mr. Khan's eloquent denunciation of Donald Trump was highlighted by his question, "Have you even read the United States Constitution?  If not, I will gladly lend you my copy."  He took out a pocket Constitution and held it up to great acclaim.  It was stirring to see an arena full of people responding to plainly spoken outrage from a man whose son sacrificed his life for his country.  Mr. Khan, speaking of that sacrifice, drubbed Trump with the words, "You have sacrificed nothing."
     Trump, of course, responded (via tweets).  He seemed baffled by the idea that he never sacrificed anything.  He pointed to his buildings, the "thousands and thousands" of jobs he's given to people.  His role as a successful American businessman also came up somewhere.  In describing Trump's response here, the word obtuse comes to mind.  Anyone with a heart and a discerning mind can realize that describing a notion of sacrifice as devoting time to business, missing meals with family, and also linking sacrifice with self-aggrandizement (putting up buildings, spending money, hiring and firing, and, in the real world outside Trump's propaganda about himself, hiring workers and stiffing them), and then comparing it with losing a child to war, amounts to a man (tweeting in his golden tower) who may be the essence of evil.
     Trump went further.  As he demonstrated earlier this year with Mrs. Ted Cruz, he has no qualms about spitting bile at other men's wives.  For some weird reason, it bothers Trump that Mrs. Khan appeared on stage next to her husband, but didn't say anything herself.  She later said, in an interview, that the death of her son is still a very raw thing in their lives, and she can't even look at his picture, yet.
     Mr. Khan has been interviewed several times since Thursday.  His reactions to Trump's evil remain consistent and well-expressed.  He said Trump "has a black soul."  Though not a scientifically precise description, anyone who understands human feelings, yearnings, compassion, can appreciate the meaning of such a statement coming from someone who really knows what it's like to lose a son in war; who really supports his adopted country, the very same United States Trump seeks to dominate with his characteristic lack of empathy and hard-headed cruelty, all carried out, as we saw with his poorly executed Convention, with incompetence and whim-based directives.
     Enter the surrogates, earning their paychecks as Trump's defenders on the news stations.  One of them said Mr. Khan used the pocket Constitution during his speech "as a prop," adding, "He doesn't know what Mr. Trump has read or not read."  The surrogate insisted Trump has read the Constitution.  Really?  All of it?  Like he's read his "favorite book," The Bible?  Is this the same reality where Trump "wrote" The Art of the Deal and all of "his" other books, and didn't, as evidence shows, have ghost writers compose them?  The same reality in which Trump had nothing to do, he insisted afterwards, with the Convention's planning, even though there's overwhelming evidence he did?
     One of my favorite films, The Whole Wide World, is the story of one of my favorite writers, Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Cimmerian, Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis, and many other characters in a huge number of adventure stories, weird and historical.  He lived only thirty years, killing himself in 1936.  In the film, dealing with Howard's only serious romantic relationship, he tells his girlfriend, Novalyne Price, about the political world of the future.  Inspired by Roosevelt's New Deal, she has optimistic views, but his perspective is dark as he compares America to the late Roman Empire, the increasingly cruel and horrible arena spectacles, the mounting depravity of rulers, the decay mounting as time passes, so that after a while things that seemed beyond the pale are now acceptable.
     Is that a correct perception of today, at least in broad detail?  I think so.  I know that scene in the film resonated with me when I saw it in the late 1990s, before the War on Terror, before Guantanamo Bay and "torture memos", before the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib, before 9/11, before the circus of Sarah Palin and the mirror maze of the 2015-2016 election cycle.  As Howard puts it in the film (based on a book by Novalyne Price, so maybe he really said the above), it's a display of increasing decadence, itself a symptom of a long fall (and transformation) of a civilization.  Talk at the Democratic National Convention of this being an "American century!" disturbed me with its broad implications.  There are many high-level participants in the American century project; some called Cheney and Bush, others called Clinton and Obama.  Trump, it looks like, is the buffoon ejaculating on everyone, willing to burn the world to a crisp so long as his ego isn't damaged.
     I heard someone on cable news say we live in a "post-fact era."  That's like saying "post-truth era."  If that's truly the case, and Trump's rise suggests it might be, then we're living more and more in what Robert E. Howard described as an arena, where fantasies come to life, dominating thoughts and more and more minds, corrupted by a growing inability to recognize the importance of what is real.
     I, for one, believe Mr. and Mrs. Khan and I accept the heroism of their son.  Donald Trump and his ratfuck army of apologists, attacking the Khans (and Muslims by extension), want us to believe their own illusions, as if we'll be saved by the made-up crap extruded moment by moment from the candidate's malicious craft.

                                                                                Vic Neptune