Red Paint Upsets More Than Blood

     In 1979, Steve Martin released his third album, Comedy Is Not Pretty!  It may seem quaint to young people used to getting their laughs from funny YouTube videos, but in the 1960s and 1970s, albums featuring comedians like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Cosby (long before we knew unpleasant things about him), and Richard Pryor were common listening entertainment in American households.  The second vinyl LP I ever owned was Bill Cosby's fifteenth comedy album, Fat Albert, released in 1973 and recorded the previous year at Harrah's hotel and casino in Reno, Nevada.  I didn't own any Steve Martin albums, but I heard them.  In 1979, prominent comedians on television, like Martin, stood out.  Now, comedians and their profession are a main part of entertainment culture.  They branch out into film acting, they do cable TV specials, their tweets get quoted, they host TV shows.
     One comedian, Kathy Griffin, is in a great deal of trouble for posting a photo of herself holding an obvious replica of President Trump's severed head, face all bloody with red stuff that Griffin, as part of her performance art piece, telegraphed beforehand (lamely and dulling the overall effect) to her social media audience as being fake.
     The predictable outrage following this released picture, the facsimile of Trump's ugly visage blurred, just as the severed heads of ISIS victims are also obscured in American news, followed the usual pattern.  Statements of shock, a nation affronted by an unthinkable act of grotesque mockery of the President of the United States, the same man who, around the time of Griffin's political statement, went to Saudi Arabia, a 110 billion dollar arms deal at the ready for a nation with a government that beheads convicted criminals in public.
     If Griffin was thinking of the desert Kingdom's predilection for judiciary decapitation when she had the controversial and "outrageous" photo taken, I don't know.  I do know she hates Donald Trump; that's obvious.  She shares this emotion with (conservative estimate) 150 million Americans.  I hate him, it's likely you also hate him.  He's a hateful man.  Nothing he says or does inspires my admiration.  That Kathy Griffin, employed (and now fired) by CNN for their annual New Year's Eve countdowns from Times Square, chose to display a "severed President Trump head" means very little to my life.  I understand that the Secret Service probably plans, if they haven't done so already, to have a talk with Griffin, but she's also been receiving a more than average number of death threats.
     Another thing I understand is that mockery of political leaders is tolerated less in a state losing its grip on free speech, especially when aided, as in America, by corporate news media  The student-organized anti-Nazi White Rose movement in wartime Germany was investigated and dealt with harshly, its leaders guillotined.  Their main act against the state was anti-Hitler leaflet distribution.
     While Trump has been "grotesquely and disgustingly" mocked by a comedian, Kathy Griffin's CNN colleague and cohost of the New Year's Eve show, Anderson Cooper, expressed his disgust for what Kathy did, saying enough anti-Griffin and anti-friendship things about her in a reaction tweet to guarantee him continued access to the monstrous pieces of shit, like Trump, who run the country.      Fuck you, Anderson Cooper.  You could've said, "I think Kathy went too far--her action disrespects the office of the Presidency, but her photo does point out the literally bloody irony of America's relationship with an oil dictatorship implicated, as President Trump himself has pointed out, in 9/11 and in the support of ISIS."
     Rocker Ted Nugent, a right wing outspoken gun nut who avoided military service in Vietnam by spending the thirty days before his draft board hearing eating only junk food and drinking Pepsi, letting personal hygiene lapse to the point of pissing and shitting in his pants so that the military recruiters could easily detect his rankness--thus making him seem mentally and physically unfit--had his own run-in with the Secret Service after threatening President Obama's life during a radio interview.  Nugent, since then, has been meek.  He speaks of fellow draft dodger Donald Trump with reverence, because the President "respects the Constitution."  He respects it so much that he wants to get the Supreme Court to consider the Muslim Ban, an important piece of the hate rhetoric that helped get him elected.
     My point, I suppose, is that a comedian showing a fake red-painted head representing Donald Trump, is hardly the worst thing we have to worry about.  Griffin, unlike Nugent, did not threaten Donald Trump's life.  She used the head as a symbol of a bloody, disgusting, violent man currently running our country, a man lacking the sense to accept climate change as a reality, thus making him dangerous to all life on Earth, as well as the dangers stemming from his presidential prerogative of maiming and killing people in the Middle East and elsewhere, the job perk inherited from Obama who did the same thing.  Why Ted Nugent doesn't admire Obama for sending drone strikes against American citizens in Yemen, for killing children there, for not closing Guantanamo Bay prison, for running an Orwellian national security state which he passed on to Trump, along with Obama's silence when Trump kills masses of Syrian and Iraqi civilians, is something only Nugent knows the answer to, but I think it involves the sentence, "I have no integrity."
     Nugent's advantage over Griffin, in all this, is that he's a man.  Yes, he got visited by the Secret Service.  That, by the way, would make an excellent reality TV program I would love to watch.  But the reaction to his radio broadcasted death threat against Obama made an ultimately insignificant ripple.  Griffin's use of a prop, one hitting a nerve in Americans' fear centers about terrorism, added pictorially to the overreaction, which came also from Trump's family, some of whom just visited the Kingdom where heads get chopped off regularly.
     Griffin's main problem, concept-wise, comes from her assumption that a dead Donald Trump would automatically make things better in America.  It would make sense for her photo to have included, in the background, a sharply dressed Vice President Mike Pence, hand over his heart, ready to take over and push for a vicious reduction in women's reproductive rights.  Pence is the flip side of a Donald Trump overthrow.  The Left, such as it is in this country, is blind on this issue.
     Pence, unlike Trump, is competently evil.

                                                                             Vic Neptune