Clear and Present Danger
Nothing shy of some yet-to-be tabulated millions of dollars and the redoubtable might of fifteen thousand troops of the United States Army, reinforced with National Guardsmen, are required at the US/Mexican border. After all, a horde of children, women, old people and other brown, Spanish-speaking noncombatants lawfully fleeing Central American tyranny, with the aim of making orderly application of asylum to the United States, have come within nine hundred miles of our sovereign border. Something must be done and it cannot wait!
This isn’t Puerto Rico, after all. Or Flint, Michigan. Or even Global Warming. Those can be dealt with all in good time. We can throw millions of dollars at those problems later. No, our Milksop-in-Chief assures us that this Brown Swarm represents a Clear and Present Danger to our very way of life. We simply cannot afford to be blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda.
The selling of this horseshit to the rabid, mouth-breathing cretins, sometimes referred to as Trump supporters, has been predictably easy. They have snapped their heads back lizard-like, and swallowed whole and untasted, this latest in an unending catalog of Trumpian canards, and are prepared to renounce, denounce, ridicule, deride and blast to Kingdom Come anyone who dares breathe a word of dissent. “Shoot ‘em all. Let God sort ‘em out.”
The more thoughtful among us, however, have certain understandable reservations. Nevermind the obvious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act forbidding the deployment of federal troops for enforcement of matters of national policy. Nevermind that the border already has armed security in the considerable form of the United States Border Patrol. Never mind that the proximity of the midterm elections might give some of the more cynical among us pause. We have to ask, is this the best dog-wagging tail that Trump and his pirate ship of psychos could come up with?
But, perhaps we are being too hasty here. I mean, after all, how else are Donald Trump and his noisome cabal of cave-dwelling mallet-brains supposed to instill fear in the breast of American voters ahead of the November midterm elections? Pay a bunch of women to allege unwarranted sexual advances against Robert Mueller? Now that would be absurd.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.