Ahsen Jillani
Well, there’s hardly any shortage of armchair quarterbacks (or barstool political consultants) during this political season—and I’m no exception. When I handed $5 to a “Will Work for Food” guy (who seemed fit enough to run a triathlon), he said that the Mexicans cost him employment prospects and he was waiting for Trump to build “The Wall.” And of course, terrorists have killed 21 people on American soil since 9/11, so a guy I work with told me that it was all because Hillary screwed up in Benghazi, India, and the Republicans needed to remedy that by electing someone with a backbone.
Welcome to the real America. It matters little now that the San Diego, CA, metro area has broken fences in back yards that separate the U.S. from Mexico; or that the Rio Grande is as wide as a stream at the Texas border. Forget that India and Libya may be 1800 miles apart and different religions, and that George Bush, in a knee jerk reaction (and with some oil interests), attacked a country with less terrorists than Detroit. That’s just “Wag the Dog” stuff that moved several trillion dollars from the pockets of hysterical middle class Americans a few miles down the road to the defense industry.
Today, I’m wasting my breath arguing with 300lb Americans with a pizza slice in one hand and a beer in the other, telling me Mexicans are taking their jobs. I have finally snapped. I’ve asked several of them how they, with a fistful of medicines for stroke, diabetes, colitis, PTSD, cholesterol, and restless leg syndrome, expect to climb a ladder and put a roof on a house. The fact is that sending the Mexican roofers home, or sending Indian programmers home, or sending Polish janitors home, won’t create a single job for the complainers in America.
Most of our Trump supporting friends lost their $15/hour jobs to the Chinese tightening screws or moving a widget across the assembly line after putting an “approved” sticker on the product. They hardly want to “change careers” from getting reality television, welfare, and disability to actually sweating for a living. The disturbing part is that it is resonating; and these people have the power to change the course of America, and likely, world history. True, the Clintons can casually drop into any town and set aside 45 minutes of their respective evenings and walk away with $750,000 in cash for speaking to an audience. Most of us need decades to make that kind of cash.
What’s real in this presidential race?
So we have a hateful womanizer, racist, and misogynist who just got a measly $1 million loan from his dad to get the ball rolling. We have his 20+ year old 757 jet, repainted and branded, and decorated inside like a tacky Atlantic City honeymoon suite. We have millions of bikers, evangelicals, unemployed ne’er-do-wells, paranoids, racists, and uneducated idealists. We have people who wanted to call Obama the “N” word but just didn’t know how to say it until the great Don gave them a voice. We have people who work at Walmart or love to shop there, but haven’t quite figured out how they will make a living with 2000% tariffs on plastic flip-flops from China. We have people who haven’t figured out that Walmart doesn’t love them and will shut down hundreds of stores once the flip-flops stop selling. Recession, anyone?
So, yes, Bill “Slick Willie” Clinton may be back in the White House again, this time just advising his wife. True, he is a womanizer and mega-rich as well, but he presided over one of the best economies in American history. The problem is that he didn’t invent the internet (that was Al Gore, remember?). That bubble came and burst, and it is hard to give credit to Clinton for that. It may be as hard as recognizing Ronald Reagan for collapsing the Soviet Empire. Reagan may have brought us as close to nuclear war as possible, made arms-for-hostages deals with Iran, made weapons-to-kill-Iranians deals with Saddam Hussein, but he is now seen as a leader of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln by the Republicans. Somewhere along the way, we got George W. Bush, who generally didn’t know if his pants were on backwards, but he listened to Uncle Cheney and Grandpa Rumsfeld and dropped bombs on 250,000 Iraqi women and children and then just went “Oooops” and went back to Texas.
That leaves us with Barack Obama. Until Trump arrived and set America straight about minorities, we just didn’t know how to treat the black, “Muslim” guy in the Oval Office. Most small businesses who were working employees for a full 40 hours (instead of 39), suddenly dropped their insurance plans and saved a bunch of money and paperwork. But they kept complaining about Obama. He killed Osama; he withdrew most of the troops out of the Middle East, but then made suspect deals with the oil sheikhs who’d been fighting for a cross-border pipeline for decades. Now we have ISIS, which seems to be partly the fired Iraqi army, and partly every other rag-tag group of terrorists that seems to have a religious agenda very close to U.S. ally Saudi Arabia. They also seem to have American weapons. So, growing economy, low oil prices, low unemployment, a few Syrian refugees from a crisis America itself financed, and here we are…ready to hand the mess to the next president.
The action really plays out in my bedroom, though. At 2am recently I proclaimed that if this racist donkey Trump gets elected, I was moving to Bangkok. My wife’s response, before she jumped out of bed and gathered her organic essential oils off the nightstand, was that if that Benghazi war criminal Hillary gets elected, she was moving to Belfast. Well, I guess the our daughters, who are wise in that they know all politicians are liars, will be living here alone when Trump decides to send all colored folks to camps. I’ll miss my neighbors. Comforting to know, however, that under Trump, things like colored people and women who could actually talk will all seem like a nightmare from America’s sordid, liberal past.
Jillani lives in Mint Hill and may get punched at a Trump rally.
Please note that the opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the overall opinions of Saathee Magazine or its Staff.
Posted: Monday, March 28, 2016
