For the second day in a row all the news was about President Donald Trump’s controversial “tweet” that four minority Democratic congresswomen go back to the dysfunctional countries of their ancestors.
Pretty much every Democrat and most of the punditry continued to pile on criticisms, while most Republicans continued to politely refrain from commenting at all. Ohio’s white Republican Rep. Michael Turner called the “tweet” racist” and urged Trump to apologize, Texas’ black Republican Rep. Will Hurd called the comment “racist and xenophobic,” while the Republican party’s sole black Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina deplored the “unacceptable personal attacks and racial offensive language” and made the very same argument we made here yesterday that it distracted from “the Democratic party’s far-left, pro-socialist policies.”
Trump, of course, defiantly doubled down.
“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” Trump told an impromptu news conference when asked about the criticism, as if some people’s agreement settles the issue. “And all I’m saying: They want to leave, they can leave.” He added that “These are people who hate our country. They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.” He further reiterated that “If you’re not happy here, you can leave,” and then again that “As far as I’m concerned, if you hate our country, if you’re not happy here, you can leave.”
Which harkened back to our boyhood days in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when the hippies and the hard-hats and the hawks and the doves were fighting it out in the streets and “America, Love It or Leave It” was a popular bumper sticker. It wasn’t a particularly happy moment in American history, as we recall, but it had a lasting influence on our understanding of America’s politics and popular culture and all the disputes that have since occurred.
We disagreed with the hippies’ call for an ignominious retreat from the Vietnam War, and agreed with our parents and President Richard Nixon that the country should press on no matter how painfully for a “peace with honor.” The hippies also had all sorts of crazy ideas about free this and free that, too, which struck even our boyish sensibilities as pie-in-the-sky and ultimately disastrous. They had all sorts of other plans to disrupt the complicated social order we were just getting used to, as well, and negotiating our way through the new world they created proved even more vexing, but at no point did we ever wish they’d just go away.
At this late point in our lives both the hippies and the hard hats and the hawks and doves seem to have gotten some things right and some things wrong. The Vietnam War was ignominiously lost when a post-Watergate Democratic majority in Congress declined to enforce the more or less “Peace With Honor” that President Richard Nixon had negotiated, but more stable and less corrupt subsequent Republicans still wound up winning the broader Cold War, and by now the Republican President of the United States states is a Vietnam-era draft-dodger who says he was “never a big fan of the Vietnam War.”
Nixon created an Environmental Protection Agency and funded the Democrats’s “New Deal” and “Great Society” social programs with bigger bucks than his Democratic predecessosr, but subsequent Republicans reigned in the worst excesses while allowing the good works to go on. The “free love” that the hippies’ “sexual revolution” promised caused a lot of venereal disease and an epidemic of divorce that had a lasting painful effect on many of our friends, but we’re glad that our many homosexual friends don’t fear harassment by law enforcement. The civil rights movement the ’60s brought has resulted in a lot of politically correct silliness, to be sure, but we’re able to work all that out with our many black- and brown- and yellow- and red-skinned friends, and are glad they don’t have to endure the segregated society we were born into.
We never did think the hippies and doves hated America. They seemed to love the blues and jazz and country-and-western and rhythm-and-blues music that is America’s greatest gift to world culture, and came up with The Doors and Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Sir Douglas Quintet and numerous other long-haired groups that made it even greater. They so loved the natural beauty of the American landscape that they’d frolic naked in its mud. They fully embraced the great American bard Walt Whitman’s exhortation to “resist much, obey little.” They availed themselves of free speech and the right to petition for redress of grievances and participated in the country’s democratic systems, occasionally for the better if more often for the worse.
Neither do we think that the hard-hats and hawks ever hated America or its ideals. At this point there’s denying that many of them long for a whiter and more heterosexual time in America, but for the most part they only want to guiltlessly listen to their favorite music and enjoy a backyard beer and freely express themselves and petition for redress of grievances and participate in the democratic processes our forefathers created.
During the eight interminable years of President Barack Obama’s administration the thrice-married and proudly adulterous Trump claimed that the president was constitutionally illegitimate by virtue of his foreign birth, a claim Trump has since disavowed, and griped about “American carnage” and claimed that “the American dream is dead,” but he never did return to Scotland where his mother was born or Germany where he falsely claims his father was born, as he apparently didn’t believe that because he disagreed with the sitting president he was therefore obliged to leave the country. We have no affection for the four minority Democratic congresswomen that Trump is currently feuding with, whose far-left and pro-socialist politics the president’s equally insane “tweets” are drawing attention from, but we hew to a constitution that does not permit sending them back to where they came from, especially since three of the four came from the very states they’ve been elected to represent in Congress..
Anyone who loves America has surely noticed some very human flaws in the scheme, for all its high ideals, and wants to use its democratic processes to create a more perfect union, and no matter how cockamamie their ideas about how to achieve that he or she has every right to do so. America and its democratic processes have gotten us through the hippies and the hard hats and even the more deadly spat between the Union and the Confederacy, so we’ll put more faith in that than we do in either Trump or those similarly scary four minority Democratic congresswomen.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 