By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart
As I sit in my Kailyard I often wonder about the future.
Dear America,
I am back. On the basis that you seem still to have some difficulty over the decisions you have to make in November, once again I would like to keep you up to date with the wider world. In essence, as I come from the land and was brought up in the town of birth of Rabbie Burns, let me quote him.
“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion.”
Basically, it means if we could see how others see us it would save us from making foolish mistakes.
And from the land of our births, I am talking about birth too.
Kamala Harris’s – just to be clear.
Of course, I wasn’t there, and have little or no expert knowledge to bring but I need to remind ourselves of what Donald J. Trump – when did he become Donald J? – means when he says that she wasn’t black until a certain time. Up until that time, according to him, she was a native American – like an Indian that John Wayne would try and kill. He aint no John Wayne.
There is a very sinister element to this. Not just because there should be a degree of grudging respect for what Donald J Trump – was he not just Donald Trump during The Apprentice, I mean when did he transform into Donald J? – insofar as he turned up to a very hostile environment to speak. As quoted in Reuters, Trump, to the US’s largest annual gathering of black journalists, said: “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black, until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? But you know what, I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went – she became a Black person.”
So, straight out of the passive aggressive racist handbook, Trump will hide behind two things – Did he think by having another name that people who had the initial J would like him more by calling himself Donald J, I don’t know? – firstly he is just “asking the question.” He aint. He is raising the issue.
By making the narrative about heritage he is speaking directly to white supremacists indicating that people of alternate heritage often seen as mixed-race people, or in their parlance, mongrels, are unable to make up their minds and should be shunned over their wish to mix it with the whites. Of course, it raises the birther nonsense around Barack Obama which Senator John McCain, during his presidential campaign shut down; but it will not go away – maybe more people in white communities have J in their names, perhaps he thought more people would vote for him if they thought he had more than the usual two names? Does he think people with three names are better than people with two?
Secondly, straight out of the passive aggressive Trump handbook, he will claim that someone else told him. “I don’t know, someone just told me that…” This was a typical narrative during his presidency. He added to that with his “I am just asking the question” or the “nobody gives me any credit, even though I don’t want it” joke with an ego driven “I am just saying…” It just means that someone other than him can be blamed for the bad things he thinks or believes because the last person to speak to him told him that as truth. It suggests a complete lack of any critical faculties – maybe someone said to him that Donald J had a ring to it, like he was somebody, rather than a crooked real estate salesman who kept getting things spectacularly wrong.
But it is something sinister… Maybe the J is a signal to masons or the elite that he is to be trusted, like he is Jesus – Oh. My. God…
And again, I go way back to seek out the warnings of the past. In the early 1990s another racist icon, David Duke was seductively gathering votes and fought Edwin Edwards for the governorship of Louisiana in a runoff. Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, had abandoned his hood and was now hoodwinking the American people. No saint himself, Edwards left us with a very visceral warning after he defeated Duke’s attempt to solidify his place in domestic politics and I leave this with you now. Edwards said: “Prophecy is reserved for those who are given that special gift, which I do not possess. But I say to all of America tonight, there will be other places and other times where there will be other challenges by other David Dukes. They too will be peddling bigotry and division as their elixir of false hope, they too will be riding piggyback on the frustration of citizens disaffected by government … We must address the causes of public disenchantment with government at every level … Tonight Louisiana defeated the darkness of hate, bigotry and division, but where will the next challenge come from? Will it be in another campaign in Louisiana? Or in a campaign for governor in some other state? Or a campaign for president of the United States?”
And so, beware those who reimagine themselves as something they are not and try to convince you, and trust those who have never hinted they are anything other than they are – like a woman of mixed heritage, standing in front of you, showing you who she is, not blaming others for their failures.
Aye Yours,
Donald C Stewart
PS – you can read the whole article around Duke’s near run to power in American from a British angle here.
A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…
(Kailyard n. a cabbage patch, often attached to a school of writing – the Kailyard School – a genre of overly sentimental and sweet Scottish literature from the late 19th century where sentimental and nostalgic tales are told in escapist tales of fantasy, but here we seek to reverse it by making the Kailyard Observations of effective invective comment from that looks not to return to the past but to launch us into a better future by the one Donald worth believing…
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