Trump Takes on the Presidents (All of 'Em)

George Washington: "Are you kidding me? Guy couldn't win a battle against the Brits to save his life. Listen, here's what I would've done: negotiate with the lobsterbacks to have just Manhattan and the Greater Metropolitan Area, let them have the rest. I mean, I'm just saying. And when I chop down a cherry tree, I own it.”

 

John Adams: "Loser."

 

Thomas Jefferson: "Dummy, and a loser."

 

James Madison: "I take turds bigger than him."

 

James Monroe: "I got a doctrine for you, build a wall on the Mexican border. Would've saved us all a lot of trouble."

 

John  Quincy Adams: "I didn't like this movie the first time I saw it, when it was his dad. Talk about nepotism."

 

Andrew Jackson: "His nickname was 'Old Hickory.' Mine is 'Young, Virile Stud.' What a loser, though he did try to get the Indians out of here. Lovely people, but they couldn't run a casino before I came along."

 

Martin Van Buren: "You know, I like his sideburns, not going to lie. Otherwise, a loser."

 

William Henry Harrison: "Who the fuck is this?"

 

John Tyler: "Loser, waste of space."

 

James K. Polk: "I'm just saying, you go annexing Mexican lands and then you're surprised at how many of them are here illegally?"

 

Zachery Taylor: "Loser, I don't believe he even served in the Mexican War."

 

Millard Fillmore: "I prefer Mallard Fillmore, I'm just being honest."

 

Franklin Pierce: "Hawkeye? Please, least-likable MASH cast member. I was always a Frank Burns fan."

 

James Buchanan: "I'm just saying..."

 

Abraham Lincoln: "I go to a theater, you don't see me getting shot."

 

Andrew Johnson: "Never met a whiskey bottle he didn't like. Loser."

 

US Grant: "I question whether he's a war hero."

 

Rutherford B. Hayes - Grover Cleveland: "Losers, all of them. I got a meeting in ten, you think we can speed this along?"

 

William McKinley: “What, are you making up guys now? Get serious.”

 

Theodore Roosevelt: "Pansy. No real man wears glasses."

 

William Howard Taft: "Somebody should follow him with a tuba, making fart noises."

 

Woodrow Wilson: "See what I said about TR."

 

Warren G. Harding: "More like Soft-ing, am I right?"

 

Calvin Coolidge: “Instead of ‘Hard-ing,’ you see?”

 

Herbert Hoover: "Get it? Soft-ing?"

 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "You don't know comedy. I know comedy. Oh, this guy. Cripple, loser. Wouldn't even get out of his chair to greet troops as they came home."

 

Harry S. Truman: "I never trust anyone from Missouri."

 

Dwight D. Eisenhower: "I question his war record."

 

John F. Kennedy: "Son of a bitch had better hair than me. Oswald took care of that."

 

Lyndon B. Johnson: "If it had been me, Vietnam would be 'Trump-Vietnam,' casinos all up and down the coast."

 

Richard Nixon: "Who doesn't tape themselves saying racist things?"

 

Gerald R. Ford: "I don't know why we ever voted for him for president."

 

Jimmy Carter: "Toothy bastard, am I right?"

 

Ronald Reagan: "Great hair, though I don't believe it's his natural color."

 

George Bush: "See what I said about pansies wearing glasses."

 

Bill Clinton: "I told him, I said 'Bill, outsource your affairs.' But did he listen?"

 

George W. Bush: "Loser, pathetic. Iraq would be a golf course if I was in charge."

 

Barack Obama: "He's from Kenya, he's black, and I assume some black Kenyans are good people. But no, not this one."

You Know, That Guy, the One With the Hair (Do I Have to Say His Name?)

Been a while since I checked in here, now that racism is over in South Carolina I don't know what all to complain about.

Just kidding (unfortunately), racism is alive and well in SC. If you ever bought stock in a company that sells or manufactures Confederate flags, you've seen your investment pay dividends. But alas, that is to be expected.

It's almost August, and August has never been my favorite month. For one thing, it's always the barometer I use for how hot it is in June and July (as in "if it's this hot now, imagine what it'll be like in August." I feel like, thanks to climate change, the dread of an August afternoon is perhaps more legit than it was beforehand). For another, it's the time when school starts back, though I'm now looking forward to school because I'm back in it. Sure, there's the prospect of having to teach a class this semester (as well as the next), on account of "that's kind of what teachers do and I'm going to school to teach/write and so...," but I'm not good in front of crowds. The one time I was good in front of a crowd, it was 2007, we'd just lost a game to Boston College (who are the Washington Generals of the ACC, so that should tell you how bad the mood was that night), and I got up on a small abutment to try and paraphrase the "friends, Romans, countrymen" speech. I had been drinking earlier in the night, but I was sober-ish by then. I was just being a punk kid.

Now I have to be a punk kid in front of other younger, punkier kids. And I have to be an adult about it. Oh...boy.

At any rate, lots of stuff going on in the news, naturally. My favorite ESPN show host, Keith Olbermann, is wrapping up his final week on the air at ESPN 2. I feel like the One Person Who Watched His Show this time around, and even I wasn't enough. After they ran off Bill Simmons, I began to think that ESPN was trying to dumb down their brand (or "Skip Bayless-Stephen A. Smith" it, if you will). With Olbermann's exit and that of Colin Cowherd (not a favorite, but at least he wasn't always sipping the Kool-Aid of the major leagues...not always, anyway), I think my suspicions are confirmed.

Also, Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show in three weeks. His replacement is a guy named "Trevor," which makes me happy from a personal standpoint. But I think we're going to miss Stewart's brand of take-no-shit and take-no-prisoners comedy this upcoming election cycle.

Which reminds me...no, not going to mention him by name (if you say it three times while looking in a mirror, his hairpiece appears on your natural hair and overwhelms it). Suffice it to say, I am just as sick of You-Know-Who as you probably are. But the GOP laid down for decades in the gutter with un-Reconstructed Southerners and bigots of all stripes: this is karma for them. In that sense, I'm happy for He Who Cannot Be Named's entry into the race. I just hope it lasts long enough that somebody from my side gets to win (I'm not sold on HRC, but mostly because I don't like obvious choices. I want a little drama with my nomination process...not as much as what's going on over on the other side, but just a little bit would be nice).

Man, if you think it's hot outside now, wait until August...

The Day They Drove Old Dixie Down

This past week has brought me to a more appreciative sense of my South Carolinian-ness, if that's even a word. As you are no doubt aware, we had the unspeakable crime of murder visited upon our state on June 17, in the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The crime was racially motivated, and the killer took photos of himself with various racial totems (including the American flag, which last time I checked did in fact fly over a nation where the distance between "all men are created equal" and the reality has been closing over the last century or so, but is nowhere near closed). What took up the media's attention, rightly or wrongly, was the fact that our state capital grounds hosted a Confederate battle flag for well over fifty years, first over the dome itself (at the bottom, below the American and state flags) and then at a "memorial for Confederate dead" when a compromise was reached over the flag's place on state grounds in the early part of this century.

That flag is down now, for good, and I couldn't be happier.

I grew up in the South, and of course I was taught that the South "had just cause" to demand its separation from the United States, that it was basically a follow-up to the 13 Colonies breaking ties with England. That the war hadn't been fought over slavery but "state's rights." I was brought up to believe this, at least in school. My mother encouraged my early reading, and my early love of history, and she never looked at the books I brought home from the library to say "oh, that's not something you should be reading" (not that I was bringing home issues of Playboy or anything: this is a public library in the South we're talking about), but my point is that she never once told me that I couldn't read something, and I read a lot (or started a lot of books, sometimes giving up after a few pages because, as a kid, I probably would've been happier with books with pictures of talking animals or whatever).

I educated myself about the war, read as much about it as I could, and I came to the conclusion that the war was fought over one thing: slavery.

I know that a lot of people defending the flag over the past month have argued otherwise, but the idea that the Confederate flag represents anything but a government bent on preserving servitude of its black inhabitants (they weren't considered "citizens" by any stretch) is patently false and delusional. Do I think every single Confederate soldier was a racist slave-owner or sympathetic to the idea that blacks were inferior and thus needed to be kept in chains? No, I do not. I think that the average infantry soldier (usually the poorest of the poor, and unable to afford slaves anyway) probably fought more because their homes were being invaded. I think that you can serve with valor and heroism for a cause which does not merit it. The Southern soldiers, the ones who displayed courage and bravery, did so in the service of a cause which was far, far beneath them. Those who fought for the preservation of slavery (including the leading politicians of the Confederacy, and many of her generals) deserved to lose the war in 1865.

Good thing I didn't give out my personal address on this thing, or else there'd be a mob of Confederate flag-waving activists on my lawn when I get home.

The fact is, the South was wrong to break away from the United States, because it did so in the service of a cause which didn't seek to honor the foundations of liberty but because it sought to deny them, to a sizable portion of its population (ironically, had the South tapped into the manpower of blacks in the region earlier as soldiers in the army, they could very well have done better militarily once the tide turned at Gettysburg. And no, the fact that the Confederacy finally grudgingly began to enlist companies of black soldiers does not mean that the racism and hatred which fueled their desire to do anything but arm slaves is suddenly and magically washed away). Whatever the Confederate flag meant before the end of the war (and it meant slavery), it came to mean far worse when taken up as a banner by the Klan and other terrorist organizations in the immediate aftermath of the war and the implementation of Reconstruction.

When the flag went up our state house flag pole in the early Sixties, it wasn't to honor the Confederate dead. It was a giant middle finger (and a threat) to the efforts of Civil Rights leaders to enact change in the South. That we're still arguing this so long after the last shots of the war were fired, and I see people that I know and like (and even some relatives) online say that it's "heritage, not hate," is heartbreaking to me. I don't expect anyone reading this to have their minds or hearts changed just because I dropped some knowledge about the Confederacy and the Civil War. But I got to hope for it.

So seeing the flag taken down, finally, on Friday morning, it was a great day to be an American, and a South Carolinian. All these people flying Rebel flags from their trucks, who went to the trouble to spend money on such things, they don't have a rallying point on the State House grounds anymore. In fact, the song "Rednecks" by Randy Newman comes to mind. It's a song written from the point-of-view of a Southern racist in the Seventies, and as such it uses a certain word that white people really shouldn't say anymore (and indeed, Newman saying it in character might not assuage casual listeners who might hear it out of context), but it's a beautiful song in terms of capturing not just the mindset of the South but also of the North (where racism, as it turns out, is not a foreign concept). But for a long time, deservedly so, the South and white Southerners have been known as the nation's preeminent racists. Taking down the flag doesn't automatically mean that racism is over in SC, but it signals that maybe we can start trying to do better, to pay back what we owe. I do think there's a place for the flag, but that place is in a museum, where a respectful treatment of the past (in all its unpleasant aspects) can take place. All these people flying the flag now, they're signs of the past, not of the future. To quote Newman, they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. And now their pathetic symbol of pride is gone from the grounds of the State House.

Good riddance to old rubbish.