GET BACK

In this era of Trump, where instead of draining the swamp, we are doing Olympic-size laps in it, where we have to hear the creepy intimate details of his Forbesplay with his porn star/daughter replicant,  I am finding myself yearning for the America that I grew up in.

Somewhat to our rescue, network TV is offering us one antidote in the form of seemingly heartfelt, nostalgic archeology, as they exhume the tombs of Will and Grace, Murphy Brown and Roseanne.   

The real reason that they are doing that is because (A) it’s the one thing that the cable companies can’t do and (B) they get to overstuff their syndication packages by adding more epi$odes to the mix.  So like your current government, it is only the illusion that it is all for you. 

Broadway is doing the exact same thing.  There are more revivals than the Deep South on the not so bright white way and there are more fake jukebox musicals than ever, hatched in the the world of Margaritavile.

At the moment, the estate of Harper Lee is suing the creative minds behind the Broadway bound production of “To Kill A Mocking Bird,” and while I side with them emotionally,  I also think that Aaron Sorkin is a national treasure and if he sees a way to make the story more relevant for our times, then sign me up.

Radio has always ear-marked a chunk of real estate that is broadcast live and dead from the cemeteries of pop music.  

SiriusXM now has a 24-hour Beatles channel and being that I happen to pray at the church of Pope JohnPaulGeorgeRingo and all I can say is that I feel fine about that.

So basically, in this era of Trump, as an alternative to that vile and disgusting reality where our embarrassmen of a drunk uncle is in charge, with his pants down around his ankles, we can program our lives to live in whatever era we need to live in at the moment.   We can time travel at will and create our very own, personal pilgrimage towards the Lourdes of our choice.

We all feel that magnetic pull.  

That heartfelt urge to rest and re-nest.

Sometimes it comes with an umbilical cord attached which ropes us in like cattle.   And sometimes that very same rope strangles the oxygen right out of our brain.  Maturity is a delicate balance.

Sometimes just the right song can, in three and a half minutes, can resuscitate us.   

It’s like getting a phone call from say,  Art Garfunkel, who’s calling to tell you that there is a bridge over troubled waters.

Music at its best is an invisible, cure-all drug that is far more far more powerful than any opioid and certainly more addictive.

We desperately need our soundtracks to help us cry or sing or help us fall asleep on demand.

Trump, in his Sherman’s march efforts to stomp all over President Obama, who years back publicly ridiculed him in a comedy sketch at a D.C. dinner (Trump, he of the birther movement, sat and fumed) is getting all the help he needs from the Confederacy to get the job done with a rebel yell and plenty of, well, ammunition.

The irony to me, is that Trump pretends to be in the construction business when in fact he’s in the destruction business.

When he was Private Citizen Candy Kane, he commandeered properties, drove them into the ground, cheated his workers, refusing to pay them for an honest day’s work done and then filed for bankruptcy so he could make a killing out of debt.

His karma is finally catching up with him because no high-end lawyer will represent him because he does not pay his bills.

And now we get to watch a previously decorated war hero, a disgruntled porn star and an ex-Playboy model, take him down, from the cheap seats of  own, personal Roman coliseum.  Because that’s what we do when our celebrities are misbehavin’.

We built them, so, we can destroy them at will and cheer for their blood.

Or better yet we watch them destroy themselves.

Because there is power in our laws and more importantly in our innate sense of morality.

The reason that we love our bibles and our constitution so much, is that both got the frailties of the human condition down pat and they both came with built in warning signs, conditions and punishments for those moments when someone chooses to defy them.

Try as he may, Trump cannot outwit a large rock, our beliefs or our combined passion for decency and fair-play.  We want our plays, TV shows and movies to come with happy endings attached.   That is just how we are wired.

The GOP is every bit as duplicitous and repellent as he is.   

The fact that Rick Santorum would tell the mass murder surviving children of Parkland that instead of trying to create “phony gun laws” they should instead learn CPR is emblematic of who they are.

They pro-life because that is just them being pretend Christians so that they can appease their church going flock, yet they will have no trouble cutting hot lunch programs or worse doing nothing after the slaughter at Sandy Hook.

Watching all them, with heads bowed in Congress or before the Republican debates is as laughable as watching Trump pray with an Oval Office full of photo op religious zealots. 

Do you really think that Mike Pence, who nods in the background, like an over eager bobble head doll as Trump spews his divisive Neo Nazi loving hatred,  is as devout as he claims?   

Personally I’m willing to bet his reading material of choice leans more towards those 1950’s magazines that featured pictures of oiled-up bodybuilders.

And so here are at the Great Divide.

On one side is Trump’s, not deplorables, but gullibles, who drink the Kool Aid by the happy face pitcher-full, believing every single thing that is being promised to them out of sheer desperation, while Fox News, which is their only news source, convinces them that liberals are a direct threat to the only life style that they have known.

And then there is the rest of us.  

Who see through this farce.  See recognize clearly, thanks to history, the dangers of these fascist-like, hate filled rallies as we watch feeling impotent as a President, as that immoral, illiterate clown and his robotic, Crisco slathered children, treat our democracy like it was their own, personal pig trough.

Because to evil people, that is what America is all about.  

It’s all about stuffing your swag bags, without giving a credible award worthy performance.

If this was the days of Nixon, Trump would be toast, because after that notorious, Saturday Night Fever Massacre it was time for congress to act as one to get rid of the cancer.

But sadly, this Congress of ours, likes it’s cancer (Pence was pro tobacco) just fine, even if it destroys the lives of every day people.

This will all end, next November, when those CPR learning kids apply their life-saving methods and revive our country not by the bullets that the GOP love more than your children, but by the power of their votes.

Until that day comes,  I’m more than happy to spend my days with those Mean Girls or listening to the choral ghosts of the Beatles who at the very least, will remind me, that when I find myself in times fo trouble,  my own sense of decency will whisper words of wisdom and remind me to Let It Be.