Adirondacks        Reading the papers here and there in our polarized country, I was recently struck by how unimaginatively schoolyard is the discourse.

I think it was Louisiana’s own rightwing bat-crazy Congressman Higgins who called for the New Orleans Public Health department to be defunded by the federal and state government based on its leader’s recommendation that children and others should be vaccinated.  He then added they were “communists.”  Really, does that still have a sting somewhere with the Cold War over now for decades, and President Trump rolling out the red carpet in Alaska for Russia’s Putin?  I don’t think so.  If you haven’t been called a communist sometime over the last number of decades, you probably just never opened your mouth.

Heck, we have socialists in Congress, both the House and Senate, running for mayor, president, and other positions, so you can’t call people socialists and expect it to bring them down.  Same for gays, trans, and others who have been willing to throw their hats in the ring.  Haters gonna hate, but calling them names, just sounds so lame and trivial.

The go-to label for Trump and his team that they seem to think is broad enough to taint everyone is to call people “terrorists”.  Want to kill a bunch of alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean, call them terrorists.  Want to deport immigrants, once again, call them terrorists and add that they are invaders.  Of course, in his run for the White House, Trump called them rapists and murderers, but that didn’t really take hold and become popular.  Here’s my real question though and the Trump team’s problem:  some Americans may not like immigrants for one reason, real or racist, or another, but does anyone think they are terrorists?  Heck no.  It’s water off a duck’s back.  Terrorists we all know hold a high bar for very low crimes, think Osama bin Laden.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.  I was listening to historian Edmund Morris’ book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt on an audiobook on the plane.  Admittedly, this is one-hundred years ago, but when those folks went after each other, it was Katie bar the door.  Teddy would call opponents everything under the sun, except a child of God.  Part of it might have come from his time in the West as opposed to hanging with the swells of New York City, but people were lily-livered, polecats, and lower than lizards and what not.  The name calling wasn’t just a kneejerk thing grabbed close at hand, but something individual, sharpened to a point, directed like an arrow to the heart, and original, befitting the American tradition.  Now, we have nothing to compare.

Trump will make up a name for someone to identify and humiliate them, but he seems to have even become bored with the practice.  It really seems simple and simple-minded now.  There are two sides, and they don’t like each other, that’s crystal clear.  In fact, it’s broader than that, since on the right, they don’t like whole groups of people.  The truth is that they have a “woke” problem, that they don’t want to admit.  They don’t like Black people, but they won’t call them what are thinking.  They don’t like gay people, but they have the same problem.  Multiply this by Mexicans, Arabs, and a host of others.  They can’t say what they are thinking because they know that won’t sell, so communists, terrorists, and so on become the default, even if they are fooling nobody.