Donald Trump’s Christmas Story is not “America’s Christmas Story”.
When I was a young boy, maybe eight or nine, my friends and I went to our normal Saturday matinee and saw “ The FBI Story”, written by Col Needham and staring Jimmy Stewart. It told the story of a dedicated FBI agent recalling the agency’s battles against the Ku Klux Klan, organized crime and Communist spies. There was one scene in the movie in which Klan menbers were at a cross-burning and even though I tried to hide my fear from my friends (gotta be tough), that scene scared me more than I had ever been scared before that.
As usual we all walked together to our neighborhood Catholic church for Saturday afternoon confession before Mass the next morning. However, even the Confessional didn’t wash the scene of the Klan burning their crosses from my mind and as soon as I was out of sight of my friends I ran directly from church to our house. I was convinced there were Klansmen behind every fence and tree just waiting to grab me and sacrifice me on one of their altars of evil.
When I got within the safety of our house I told my mother about my scary afternoon but the story she told me didn’t do much to reduce my fear about those klansmen I knew were lurking. Apparently when she was a young girl, attending a Catholic summer camp, stories of local Klansmen burning crosses on hillsides near the camp began to circulate among the parents of the campers. Those stories caused the parents of the campers, my grandfather included, to fire-up their 1950’s Chevies, Chryslers and Fords and race to the camp to protect their children from the marauding Klansmen.
Nothing my parents experienced in the 1930’s in northeastern Pennsylvania came even close to what black people experienced in the American south but even in Pennsylvania in the 1950’s it was the same Klan whose “Imperial Wizard” endorsed Donald Trump for President”. Even though trump tried to distance himself from the endorsement it’s simply a demonstration of how rump’s divisive rehetoric turns Americans against Americans. It’s no different than the Klan’s discrimination of Catholic immigrants that overlapped and conflated with their nativism, xenophobia, and ethnocentric or racist sentiments (e.g. anti-Italianism, anti-Irish sentiment, Hispanophobia, anti-Quebec sentiment, anti-Polish sentiment).
Recently Trump signed an executive order canceling a planned paltry 2.1% pay increase for federal workers in 2019, just in time to dampen their Christmas holidays. Of course trump is cutting the pay of average Americans at the same Time he and his Republican cronnies passed tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest members of American society.
Following is Plate six of William Blake’s “Europe a Prophecy”, — The poem envisions a world filled with suffering, with imagery connected to the politics of 1790s Britain. It’s not unlike the suffering connected to Trump’s divisive politics of 2018 America.
Hopefully midterm Democratic victories in the House of Representatives will send a message to well-meaning members of the Republican Party, and there are many, that the evil that Trump is spreading throughout our nation is destructive. It is destructive to who we are as Americans. Real Americans don’t make young children run through the streets of their home town in fear of evil lurking behind trees and hedges. Real Americans don’t cultivate xenophobia, ethnocentricity and racism. Real Americans don’t cut household incomes during holidays. Only Trump Americans do those horrible things. The same horrible things Klansmen did on the hills behind my Mother’s childhood summer camp.
Donald Trump’s story of evil is unmistakable. It is no different then the stoty of evil told by the Ku Klux Klan. Donald Trump’s story of evil is his Christmas Story. Real Americans need to tell a real American story that is the real American story of faith in the future grounded in love, trust and caring for each other. That is the real American Christmas story.
