WON'T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?

Those are not just the words that Rock Hudson or the affable, sweater addicted Mr. Rogers spoke.

These are the words that we all must begin and end our day with if we want to survive and most importantly, stay sane.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really tired of blowing up my spleen like a long forgotten Vegas hotel every time Trump opens his big fat McDonald’s apple pie hole.  I don’t just don’t angry, I turn instantly into a feral Werewolf, going from sweet and patient Lon Chaney, Jr to hirsute and howling  Lon Chaney, Jr. in seconds. 

What kind of way is this to live?  Besides letting off steam what are we accomplishing other than acting like the morons who continue to dance and sing, toothless and racist, in a snaking rumba line behind their idiot king?

The President’s personality and behavior have always set the gold standard for America.  For those of us who were around during the days of JFK, it was three years of daffy bliss.  

For the first time, our leader was right out of central casting.  We had our first taste of royalty since King George, plus we got a fairy tale Princess and their impossibly adorable children as part of the package.  The Princess gave us a personal televised tour of the White House while the handsome Prince kicked the crap out of the Soviets, smoked cigars, went fishing in his Ray-Bans, read James Bond and just plain charmed the world while his kids played hide and seek under the desk of the Oval Office.

For we children of the sixties, the real day that the music died was November 22, 1963.  Just like that the Brill Building went forever dark.

We were all shot dead by that assassin’s bullet right in the heart and never recovered.   It was like an adored father in one or two blinding seconds or pure, permanently impactful horror, whose images, to this day, we still play over and over again in the Zapruder film theater of our hearts and minds.

And how did we crawl out of that primordial angst ooze?  We didn’t.  We were rescued by the sudden invasion of The Beatles, whose impossible to resist, insistent brand of sonic happiness and eruptive, impossible to contain joy, infected us like the best plague ever and just like that virtually overnight,  all our smiles returned, our toes started tapping and once again, singing was not only permissible but the law.  Their soft and cheeky irreverence with the elders of the establishment showed us that we could have a sense of humor again.

Europe had ben inoculated way before us.   After being pummeled to rubble by World War Two, we Americans headed home and had ourselves one big boomer fuck fest party that started with that sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square V-J Day party.  

But Europe didn’t get the invite and continued to live under a continent-covering dark grey cloud which still lingers to this day,  over the memory scared landscape of the souls of those who were there.  Read “The Nightingale” or “All The Light We Cannot See” and you will see what a nightmare it all was.

Then came The Beatles and little by little, country by country,  with the lighthearted sweep of a Good Witch’s wand,  Europe overnight became enveloped in a daffy, fairy dust bowl storm and the dancing and hand-clapping began.

Girls became orgasmically euphoric,  Londoners heard, deeply embedded in those light-hearted melodies, their own infused national anthem and we boys suddenly found that just by growing our hair long and singing “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” pretty much guaranteed that we were going to get very lucky.

The cultural potency of the fun sixties got us through the Vietnam war and LBJ, Civil Rights water hosing protests, two assassinations, and Nixon.  

The Beatles invasion produced one pure pleasure group after another, and just like that we had The Stones,  The Dave Clark Five, The Byrds, The Moody Blues, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Freddie and The Dreamers, The Beach Boys, The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, The Mamas and The Poppas, Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Donovan and on and on and on and on,.

They all turned tragedy into curative medicine and their lyrics became a roadmap for survival.

We were one Hair-sized tribe, who could easily be identified by our long locks, free-flowing bell bottoms and flashing peace signs.  The answer to everything was simple: all you needed was love and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

And then, of course, came the drugs, which permanently evicted some of our greatest rock Gods.  George Carlin once said that the trouble with happiness is that the minute that it’s overall you want is more happiness and that is what happened to us all on the way to Altamont, via our last gasp trip in our Yellow Submarine.

Acid ecstasy was as far as we could go, so many turned to heroin and that became the shots heard round the world.   

Now it’s true that many of us wanted to learn how to leap headfirst into the deep end of our consciousness in the pursuit of feeling groovy, but one day the Hells Angels brought us crashing back down to earth.

And that is where we are today my children.   We are living with the Hells Angels of America whose bacterial contagions are killing our sense of humanity.

Gone is the inherent bliss of the Obama years and just like that we are all living in base camp, where racism and hate is surrounding us like angry Native American Indians on horseback who in this case are the members of the GOPhuck Yourself party whose poison-tipped arrows are being aimed with lethal intent, at  the bullseye heart of Medicare, Social Security and most of all, human decency.

Greed is once again good.

As I mentioned earlier,  the newly elected President’s behavior quickly becomes the behavior of the country and that is exactly what has happened.

Trump, who has never been anything else than a bankrupting loser; a carnie style, not so P.C. Barnum swindler/pathological liar, who games the system at the expense of everyday people, is raping and pillaging us like, well, the Cossacks, joined by an army of lemmings who are blithely cheerful about jumping off the edge of a cliff, even if it means their own demise, to at least enjoy their smug, lily-white final moments.

But by us countering them with the very same brand of hate and derision that they buy like it’s on sale at Costco, is simply not the way to go.   All we are doing is spraying lighter fluid on their Virginia coal.

The biggest joke of all is how they have twisted the words of Jesus and turned them into some kind of perverse bible for their own selfish interpretation of Christianity.

Just like you can’t argue with an extremist to leave a woman’s body alone, you cannot have discourse with a Trump supporter, who have all learned how to argue their cause, by acting like their Infant clown leader did beginning with the Republican debates.

Trump was inhumanly rude and insulting because he did not give a shit about winning.  His dream was to become the next Roger Ailes/Rupert Murdoch, by creating a brand that spoke exclusively to the morons, Howard Stern style, so that he could get the Trump Network up and running which would have all the style and substance of Fox News meets the Home Shopping Network.

But the frat boy meet trust fund baby goof (beginning with the whole Mexicans are racists, murderers and drug dealers), was far more potent attempt at branding than he ever could have imagined, and just like that, well, we are all living the end of the nightmare story right now and just can’t wake up.

Trump’s world is based in bankruptcy and destruction, where he makes a killing by losing.  And since he has been owned by the Russians for decades, in return for their help in getting him elected, he is single-handedly, with the help of the most disgusting cabinet in American history, destroying each and every department en route to weakening America and the planet to its core so Putin’s Russia can become the world power that it has long not been. Putin thrives off of chaos and murder.  Welcome the USASSR.

So you have every right to be disgusted by this treasonous, foul-mouthed idiot

But to live in bile is, in the end, is just us marinating in ulcers and heartache.

So I implore you all, to be better and smarter than that.   If you need to vent, I encourage you to find a way to do it just like I do, virtually every single day, via these blogs.  This is as much for me as it is for you.

But I would also caution you to never ever engage a Trump person because their condition is not worthy of your time or compassion.  They are a waste of your time.

You see, for them, the only thing that has changed is that thanks to Trump, their long barely closeted behavior which has long been obscured by their Sunday pilgrimages to the local church, coupled with their public Southern hospitality, is now out there for the whole world to see and hear.    

They think that saying anything they want is a form of freedom of speech which according to our Constitution which none of them have ever read, is clearly defined as a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or sanction.

It does not give you the right to insult minorities, enforce sexism, report lies in the news or justify the reason that you are harming someone.

But since they are uneducable, the only way to survive the chilling rise of the new fascism is by countering it with superior behavior and truthful discourse amongst ourselves while we get those apathetic tens of millions of Americans who did not vote in 2016, to the polls.

The kids at Parkland, heroes all, are the paradigm here.   They easily could have become bitter and angry and literally fired back at those who are attacking them.  But instead, they are David Hogging the spotlight, clearly articulating their cause and inspiring millions of young people to vote/drive the sewer rats of Congress out of office.   Unlike the parents of Sandy Hook, they were already trained to debate and know how to use the internet to their advantage.  (I do implore you all to get David’s book and demand that the “reviews” that personally attack him, be removed).

To the Trump world, Patriotism is a pure form of Scalia-quality self-entitlement.  It’s all about their rights, their selfish, intolerant needs which they will go to their graves trying to win via prayers, lottery tickets or Publisher’s Clearing House scams while they spend their food stamps on life numbing booze and cigarettes.   Friends who were raised in  that world have told me that they frown at the idea of their kids going to college for fear of them losing a grip on THEIR way of life.

My point of view comes from my reading the spec actually book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”  It is not me reducing that world to a cultural stereotype.   I spent weeks in the south this year with a beloved friend, from Nashville to Georgia to Memphis to Arkansas and Oklahoma and we saw firsthand the diversity of the people there.   To lump them all together as one and categorize them would be beyond wrong.  I actually adored my time there.

You know who I am speaking about here.

It’s time for the new revolution.  It is time to organize.  It is time to vocalize.  It is time to convert your useless anger into the energy that is required to kickstart the movement that took out Richard Nixon and his band of crooks.

Look what the constitutional right to take a knee as a form of peaceful protest ignited.  None of those protestors, which included the staggeringly closed minded Mike Pence, took the time to read up on Colin Kaepernick.  Had they made the effort they would have discovered one very heartfelt, philanthropic American.  A truly decent, generous man.   But no.  It was racism to the core of the bone.

Let’s be everything that Trump is not.  

Let’s be brilliant, creative, moral, kind, brotherly and sisterly.   Let’s let our brand outsell his.

Stop exhausting yourself with hopelessness.

You are a victim as long as you declare yourself one.  

You surrender when the fight is out of you.

Stop letting him win.