New York

Pistol packing federal government goons in Gestapo drag—balaclava mask, camo fatigues, reflective specs, combat boots—are swarming through cities and towns across the United States as I write. They are on a mission to rescue America from the scourge of asylum-seeking migrants who work sweatshop jobs, or as nannies or restaurant dishwashers or farm and construction laborers.

Soon, they will accentuate their fascist drag with heavy polyester mitts that Adolf Hitler’s street brawling Sturmabteilung would surely have envied.

The purpose of this new handwear for Donald Trump’s own bully-boys is to zap highly persuasive fingertip jolts of electricity into the necks of dangerous “illegal aliens”—the aforementioned nannies and so forth, many of whom resist being frog-marched to prisoner transport vehicles enroute to the fast-growing archipelago of concentration camps, thence for deportation to someplace in Africa they never heard of.

If not for persuasive zapping, the bully-boys would have to club resisters into submission or shoot them dead, which happens. But which is not a good look on the evening television news.

Enter goon gloves, let us call them. They are classified by the U.S. Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters.” A government goon, whether punching a woebegone migrant with right fist or left, thereby achieves electronic compliance with a GLOVE. Get it?

—Such a cute acronym, GLOVE. Is this how to Make America Great Again (MAGA) or what?

A high-ranking stooge in the Trump administration—Markwayne Mullin, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and high school wrestling star back in his home state of Oklahoma who became an undefeated mixed martial arts cage fighter (seriously)—believes the answer is yes. Civil rights organizations believe otherwise; their lawyers are quietly gearing up for litigation virtually guaranteed to wind up before the Trump-friendly U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mullin and his president pal have hired Compliant Technologies of Lexington, Kentucky, to manufacture a stockpile of handy electroshock units for use by twenty-two thousand pistol packers of ICE, the notorious Homeland Security unit commanded by a currently uncaged Mr. Mullin.

For its contracted services, Compliant Technologies is set to improve its corporate exchequer by $20,000,000 (€17.ll million), commencing with the great GLOVE roll-out early in the New Year of 2027.

—And aren’t those terms cute as well? “Compliant” and the chilling acronym ICE?…and that word “Homeland,” reminiscent of Hitler’s persistent call for defense of the German “Vaterland.”    

So, un-gentleman in your masks—let the games begin!

Round up the usual suspects! Send them to the mat!

Shoot for the target of three thousand arrests every day until we’ve got all of them out of the way!

…And of course, you know the dastardly them: those of cocoa complexion and a proclivity for hablano español.)

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News of goon gloves was announced by the Department of Homeland Security back on August 10, via its procurement forecast and public notice database. Yawns were duly inspired, eyebrows hardly rose. Few questioned why this advance in weaponry wasn’t flogged in screaming headlines from coast to coast.

The answer: Here in the of Trumpistan, home to a shocking number of forever moralizing Christianists selectively blind to sins of the flesh and the dollar, we are numbed by an endless stream of diktats from our lumpy Führer—a man whose thirty-four felony convictions for greasy financial transactions stemming from his liaison with pornographic movie queen Stormy Daniels now exceeds his thirty-three percent approval rating, as measured in late August by three of the most consistently accurate national opinion polls.

We are numbed as well by the faithful refusal of Donald Trump’s choir, namely the once respectable Republican Party, to challenge his descent into violent madness.

Electroshock move-it-along mitts? Price tag: a cool  twenty million, but who’s counting?

Sure, whatever Lumpy likes. Read all about it in the small print of an ICE database.

…And really, why should everyday English-speaking white Americans care? Surely the glove goons will never come chasing after us.

The pain of unseen victims brutalized by ICE goons—or murdered, as they were in Minneapolis earlier this year—is none of our business, so it might seem just now. We are exhausted by normalized thuggery, barely able to imagine what we know is our duty: to decry the abomination of a government that would subject its people—any of us—to cattle prods, as our government plans to do in the New Year.

Yet how we wish to howl, long and loud in bitter unison, “We are not animals!”

In the Church of Trump, cruelty is centermost to a trinity that includes corruption and chaos—three pillars of distraction from unholy conduct of the prelate, foremost our Lord and Führer, to wit:

• A few weeks ago, a long series of appeals came to closure when a New York court upheld a $5,600,000 (€4.83 million) judgement against Donald Trump regarding his assault on New York journalist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. A state civil court jury found that Mr. Trump slammed Ms. Carroll against a wall, hiked up her skirt and shoved his fingers into her vagina.

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                                                                                                        ^{—FOTOS, from left: CNN Television, ABC Television}

               

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Repeatedly over during the past decade, we have cooperated with Lumpy’s distractions by ceding to sleep as the balm against chaos. Among these:

• The case of Ms. Carroll, plus more than twenty other New York women who claim they were sexually abused by Donald Trump.

• A pointless (and losing) war against Iran, in which American bomber planes  killed nearly two-hundred children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the southern city of Miab.

• The refusal by Mr. Trump’s stooge at the Department of Justice to release all documents relevant to the president’s longtime association with the late child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who supposedly hanged himself in a New York jail cell while awaiting federal trial.

• Lumpy’s vanity project proposals: The Donald Trump portrait on a newly created $250 bill, never mind federal law 31.U.S.C.§5114(b), prohibiting the likeness of a living person on U.S. currency and securities; the Trump name, alongside that of President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), chiseled into the Bianco Carrara marble walls of Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; the “Triumphal Arch,” a massive Roman/Beaux-Arts structure that would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe of Paris, set in a Washington traffic circle and featuring gilded statuary and inscriptions (including, to be sure, the Trump name).  

About that “living person” exemption regarding American currency illustration: There are voices in the land assuring us that the law needn’t be tested in court, that the 80-year-old visage of Donald Trump—his faccia di culo, as the Italians might say—could indeed make it to the printing presses of the U.S. Mint on account of his welcome demise.

And about sleep: The bard of Avon wrote four hundred and twenty-three years ago, ”To sleep, perchance to dream.” And as written one hundred and sixty-five years ago by a good and poetic man in the White House, must invest our trust in “the better angels of our nature.”

I had an inchoate dream the other night about the squalor of Trumpistan, and how it faces moral measurement in accordance with the concept of Final Judgment in Roman Catholic theology. A Day of Reckoning, in other words.

Is such a Day nigh? Will some righteous soul, or souls, step forward to storm the Church of Trump and turn over the tables laden with gold?

What if righteousness returns and, as folks say in Alabama, “Hey, boy, let’s get to peeping through the mud to see dry land!”

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THE TRIUMPHAL ARCH

Like Donald, like Adolf

                                      

Mr. Trump is exceedingly interested in the aforementioned Triumphal Arch project, estimated to cost a minimum $100,000,000 (€86.27 million). Rather than relying on traditional multi-year congressional monument commissions for consensus and approvals, he has taken direct ownership of the idea, selected the site, championed its architectural renderings, and leveraging his presidential appointments on bodies such as the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts to fast-track the whole shebang.

On inclement days—when he customarily plays golf despite the weather—he is seen in the Oval Office side-by-side with construction engineers working out nose-to-the-grindstone minutiae required to build an edifice for the ages. In Lumpy-speak, a project “like no one’s ever seen.”

So, too, did Adolf Hitler obsess over Das Führermuseum, his unrealized European cultural complex, intended for his Austrian hometown of Linz—rather than Vienna. (Hitler, a frustrated  painter, despised the capital due to his rejection by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.)

Thought to be ready for the public enjoyment and edification by the year 1950, Herr Hitler’s museum hopes were dashed in ’45 with the end of World War 2, which saw him gobbling cyanide like others of his Nazi ilk. C’est la vie.

Objections to Lumpy’s arch abound. Beyond its hefty price, certain to rise, and the ludicrously imperial size of the project, there is objection to a garish Hitlerian aesthetic plopped down in the middle of a busy traffic circle in Washington.

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We must not sleep now through distractions thrown up by Donald Trump and his minions—the electroshock gloves, the war, the Triumphal Arch and so on and so on and so on. We need to be fully awake in this month of September as we begin the hard slog of campaigning leading up to Election Day on November 5—a day of reckoning if ever there was.

Fortunately, all indicators point to the beginning of the end of Trumpism. Not with the whimper of suicide as with Herr Hitler and his bunch, but with the bang of defeat as Republicans who control both houses of Congress will be sent packing, leaving Lumpy alone in the Oval Office with his tirades of juvenile ranting and raving.

But indicators also show that Lumpy and his partisan lackeys—including  “justices” of the august Supreme Court—are busy with plots to intimidate voters, especially those of the non-Aryan persuasion. Among these plots, Mr. Trump demands that armed ICE thugs patrol polling sites in search of those pesky “illegals.”

We must spend time awake, and aware that the wicked seldom sleep.

We must cry for the beloved country at this time, a nation that might would accept the disease named Donald Trump and the evil intent of his electroshock compliance gloves.

We must be guided by better angels in putting an end to cruelty in our name.

We must heed two uplifting Latin maxims, these I first learned as a lad and somehow knew to hold as important memory: Princiiis obsta and Finem respice—“Nip it in the bud” and “Look to the outcome.”

THOMAS ADCOCK

U.S. correspondent

His essays with us: click here.