Hundreds of baboons stormed the U.S. Capitol building yesterday, attempting to seize control of the government, and they got off light.
A few died, but had they been black, scores would be dead today.
Don’t tell me, gentle reader, to not make this issue about race. It couldn’t be more about race. Race has been the issue all along for Donald Trump. It’s how he built his coalition and the ace card that kept him in power. In the words of satirist Randy Newman, Trump was keeping the niggers down.
Trump was building walls – literally and figuratively – to keep the brown and black people out and away from the gears of power while signaling to white folks, “Shush. Join my club. I’ll give you everything you want.”
The Capitol riot was the last hurrah of the Angry White Folks. It had to happen because white folks don’t give up easy. It took most of the rest of the world to beat them into submission in World War II. They have believed for centuries that control of the world is their birthright.
Angry White Folks suffered their first devastating blow in 2008 when a half-black man was elected U.S. president and did the job well, as good and perhaps better than most white men who held the job. That was much more than Angry White Folks could swallow.
The only way they could reconcile Barrack Obama’s triumph with their way of thinking was to discredit the presidency itself, the media, the rule of law – virtually all of government – as a sham, a fake, a conspiracy orchestrated by shadowy, unnamed “elites.”
To prove it, Angry White Folks chose a complete outsider – a loudmouth bigot who had never served government as so much as a small-town dogcatcher – as their leader. “Look,” they said of their hero the mad president, “anyone can do the job.”
Only he couldn’t. Trump was not the master of the universe that he or his supporters imagined him to be. He didn’t have sense enough to observe even the first rule of politics: Keep your mouth shut and your head down when you’re winning.
He was the dandy General Custer, all gussied up in buckskins and firing off his mouth in the heat of battle, so dangerously self-deluded as to believe himself invincible. He got what was coming to him.
It’s tempting to say that the self-proclaimed Big Man was taken down by a tiny, invisible germ, the coronavirus. But the truth is that Trump died of hemorrhaging from deep and multiple, self-inflicted wounds.
To all but the rabid band of violent thugs who still worshiped him after voters rejected him Nov. 3, he became the Black Knight in the famous Monty Python skit, his legs and arms cut off, still taunting his conquerors that he would “bite their legs off.”
On Tuesday I sent a Facebook message to a white man who would not accept Trump’s defeat. I asked him, “What do you want to do, overthrow the government?” The apparent response to that question came from Wednesday’s rioters: Yes, we do.
Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol wasn’t only about Trump refusing to acknowledge defeat and inciting his thugs to violence. It was also about Tuesday’s election in Georgia, when Angry White Folks lost control of their last bastion of power, the U.S. Senate, due largely to the efforts of one very determined, very black woman: Stacey Abrams.
That was the final straw.
Early Wednesday, several Angry White Folks in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives still opposed certifying the presidential election results in states where brown and black people helped elect Joe Biden, but they couldn’t deny the message coming to them from the great majority of Americans: You can’t have everything your way.
Most people learn this lesson at around age two, but for Angry White Folks it didn’t sink in until Tuesday night. So on Wednesday they did what most two-year-olds do in the same situation: They threw a fit.
For their actions, the perpetrators should be jailed and tried in court for attempting a violent overthrow of the nation, a serious, federal crime.
At that very least, they should face the same level of prosecution that eight men – Jews, hippies, pacifists and a black man – faced for allegedly inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
But they won’t be, because they’re Angry White Folks, and they still get most of what they want in the USA.