“There are individuals who are so toxic that their presence threatens us all. They self-identify by their *conduct.* And we cannot protect ourselves from monsters by calling them by another name.”
— Andrew Vachss
June 12, 2016 — one year ago today.
In his final act as a member of the human race, a deeply disturbed version of George Zimmerman (Yes…I said it) fatally attacks an Orlando LGBT nightclub on Latino Night, achieving an historic body count using a military assault rifle that he recently purchased as effortlessly as a pack of cigarettes. And until the very moment he pulled the trigger he had broken no laws in the state of Florida. Until the moment he called 911 and linked his castaway Muslim soul with Islamic State jihad, he was not an enemy of the State. From start to finish, he was a native-born American citizen.
If I were a Republican on that following day, I would not have known what to say beyond boilerplate “thoughts and prayers” pablum, which was the verbatim response from scores of GOP politicos who’s voting base requires them to actively oppose civil and social justice for all LGBT and Latino demographic groups as well as any degree of rational firearms regulation. The same voting base who consistently cheer the perpetual torment of all followers of Muslim faith and drive the disaffected into the arms of beasts pretending to be the defenders of Islam.
The demography of the affected and the horrified in Orlando intersecting with the emotion-driven hodge-podge of shape-shifting ideologies and bigotry propelling the modern GOP has succeeded in triangulating the utterly toxic stasis of that party. Now, through the ‘will of the voters’ they have elevated the defiant face of Donald Trump to sit atop their totem of Jesus, Country, and Christian values.
Trump and Republicans, who self-identify by their conduct, have no interest in navigating a minefield of galvanized communities of Latino, LGBT, Muslim, and gun safety advocates all across this Nation. Their answer to reducing a future body count is to reduce the number of Latinos with a border wall and a robustly indiscriminate nationwide dragnet to capture, detain and deport 11 million of them.
The current Republicans’ engine of progress sees a remedy for radicalized native-born citizens in escalating the demonization of populations of an entire religion and banning all future travel to our shores by any soul with that viral infection. Their formula for modulating LGBTQ discrimination and bigotry is to institutionalize discrimination and bigotry as an exclusive religious right of Christian citizens who just want to practice their religion by imposing it upon everyone else.
Then of course is the manner of weaponry. The party of NRA marionettes wants to assure that America has the best equipped terrorists and mass murderers, by rolling back firearms regulations and expanding gun rights to the mentally ill and to suspected domestic terrorists. All quite sensible, don’t you see?
Give us this day our daily bread…of predictable right-wing pundits’ blame games, because –you know– somebody is responsible for random carnage where ever it may occur. What lessons have Republican surrogates learned in the year since the Orlando and Dallas attacks?
Those armchair provocateurs who furnish social and political conjecture, made in aerodynamic comfort from 40,000 feet, can always be counted on to phone down to Foxbot Nation with toxic commentary of half-baked pedantry, and Munchhausen-by-proxy. The myopic god’s eye views from their sub-orbital vantage points and their confirmation bias profit centers make clear that blame falls on the usual people — their mainstay of doppelgänged caricatures that are the inspirational core of all the relentlessly huckstered vilification that generates their paychecks or advances their political fortunes.
When tragedy strikes anywhere around the globe, a codependent audience awaits their favored pundits’ reductionist conclusions in connecting the dots of responsibility that invariably links accountability for a trigger-man or perpetrators to the right wing’s short list of fungible, bash-worthy political adversaries. Obama, Hillary, Elizabeth Warren, ragtag libtards, Democrats, and Black Lives Matter must in turn bear the blame.
The connective path of the planchette on their media Ouija boards persistently veers away from the mutilated soul of the murderer and from the kinds of insane legal impunity enjoyed in Texas that permits an assassin to openly carry a military assault weapon through a crowd of police officers until he reaches a tactical position from which he can open fire to cut them down with legally purchased armor piercing “cop killer” bullets.