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| Nick Anderson / Cagle Cartoons |
“A Divider Not a Uniter, Trump Widens the Breach”
--Peter Baker, The New York Times, Sept. 24, 2017
T***p’s a caesura, a seizure, a thing that goes a-sailing
and assailing but needs desperate restraining; I think
of the psych ward patients in horror films but reimagine
them as reenactors, the way the Civil War never ended,
and a sort of clown makeup hairdo skin cross, no, crucifix
between John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy. T***p’s
a business man, wise with pennies. Let’s call him Penny-
wise, for short. An It man. In the whitest house ripping
the country in have and have-nots. A snot Prez, a denier,
the dernier person we’d want to wed to the Presidency,
a David Duke of Earl. But a part of me doesn’t blame
T***p, but rather blames the T***p voter who set up
for this country to be torn apart . . . You see racists hid
right in the word supremacists, hid right in the voting
booths. The waitress approaches, says, Would you like
a John Wilkes table or a John Wilkes booth? The sick
temper of his Sic semper tyrannis Oedipus train wrecks.
Even the Republicans at work are finally mumbling,
This guy’s a friggin idiot. His only talent is garnering
media tension, ad nauseam. You ever see a supposed
strong man rip a phone book in half? It’s really sort of
highly unimpressive.
Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017).
