Going Where No President Has Gone Before
Among the achievements the president did not list in the State of Disunion 2018 message—some of which dated to the first year of the Hoover administration (1929) and not including having the greatest number of wife-beaters, per capita, on staff in the history of the White House—was his most recent contribution to civic discourse.
I am referring to the remarks he made during a discussion with Congressional leaders regarding immigration reform. As you recall, the greatest statesman of the century, in his mind, questioned why USA should accept immigrants from Haiti and other shithole countries in Africa.
So presidential!
To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line about the embattled farmers at Lexington and Concord, it was the shithole heard around the world.
Many parts of the world were shocked at the greatest statesman of the century’s vulgar insult of underachieving friendly nations who meant well, taking further umbrage at the codicil to his message that we should be bringing in more Norwegians.
Some picky critics wanted to know what self-respecting Norse would want to come to a shithole country like ours that didn’t even have national health insurance and that made students leave university with $100,000 worth of debt and still couldn’t find suitable jobs.
As promised during the campaign, the president who has told more lies in a single year than all of his predecessors combined, had finally gone where no president has gone before.
He had struck another blow for cultural and political vandalism by introducing the concept of telling it like it is in international diplomacy.
At the same time, nailing down his claim of being a populist president, appealing to his base as a man who knew how to use street language despite being so rich!
As the shithole hit the fan around the world over the president’s courageous language initiative, as is his custom when it gets too hot in the kitchen, our commander-in-chief denied he had used the offensive word.
The senators taking that meeting in the Oval Office didn’t hear right, argued the Leader of the Free World (LFW).
What he actually said, the president explained, was not shitholes but shithouses.
Whatever, it wasn’t the first time vulgarities had been used in the Oval Office. But the Quaker President Nixon used them in private (“Fuck thee” may have been among the deletions on the missing 18 minutes). President Trump might be wise to activate the Nixon Memorial Taping System as a defense against those who would misquote him in future books about his zany administration.
What might have been a misspeaking or mishearing, whatever, had the additional advantage of briefly changing the national conversation. Instead of collusion with the Russians, everybody I know was playing a new parlor game. It began with the question “And what shithole country did your grandparents come from?”
Like many incendiary pronuncimentos this first year, there is an illogic about immigration that is so Trumpian. As I recall, there seemed to be some confusion about the Trump family immigration status.
Readers of the official campaign autobiography, “The Art of the Deal,” learned the Trumps came from Sweden, as the most famous of them attested.
That reminded me of the “Saturday Night Live’ transcendental classic family sketch series, “The Coneheads.” Whenever nosy next-door neighbors inquired where they were from, Papa Conehead replied, “We are from France.”
Actually, great grandfather Fredrich Drumpf, landed on our shores in 1886 as a penniless 16 -year old from a country that would have made Pres. Grover Cleveland’s shithole list. Germany was an unpopular source of immigrants at that time (along with Ireland and Italy), being a hot bed of radicalism and revolution that gave us that shithead Karl Marx.
So illegal immigrant jumping ship Zayde Drumpf changed his name to Fred Trump and lived long and prospered.
Grandson Donald does not go into this military issue, but the founding grandfather of the Trump fortune may have been a draft-dodger, escaping service in Kaiser Wilhelm’s war machine.
Not that there was anything wrong with that. My ancestors came from that shithole Czarist Russia, avoiding the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Draftees served for 25 years before the Czar said “Thank you for your service.”
Should the president consider continuing going where no president has gone before in the war against political correctness in language—an example of evil government over reach —I call his attention to a book that should be on his night table.
It’s a short book, written by George Carlin, titled “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” A compendium of all the dirty, smutty, in bad or questionable taste words, considered highly inappropriate and unsuitable for broadcast on the public airwaves in the USA, whether radio or television, it was written in 1972, and still timely.
Since the president is such a notorious non-reader, and so busy bankrupting the nation with his tax cuts and joke of a budget that is in keeping with the great deal maker’s record of four bankruptcies as a business genius, I will cut to the chase here.
Before Scotty beams him up to whatever planet he came from, these are the Unexpurgated Carlin Seven (minus one of the forbidden already pressed into official use):
Bleep, BLEEP, bleeping, BLEEP, Bleep and Bleep-ER.
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Marvin Kitman,
Feb. 14, 2018