How America Became Too Great a Nation to Shelter War Orphans

If I had to guess, I’d say Chris Christie has probably been bullied his entire life.

I say this because Christie projects an aura of belligerent overcompensation.

Those of us with any degree of social awareness know these are men to avoid. Under the assumption that critical introspection is a wholly feminine endeavor, their moral compass is corrupted by their deep-seated need to protect themselves from other men by aping bigger and tougher than other men.

Making Christie a horrible person to be around but a great fit for the Republican party.

In recent months, he has cultivated a public persona of bullshit bravado and fascist rhetoric in an attempt to be seen as a “hard” candidate. Self-important white men like Chris Christie imagine they appeal best to fearful reactionaries. Fate has fallen upon them to deliver us out of the desert of thinking too hard, with the certitude of a born-again pastor reading to drunks from a dogeared Bible.

I know this because for weeks I’ve heard nothing but economic falsehoods delivered with cocksure conviction by men who I guarantee would fail the annual AP Economics exam taken by 11th graders.

The facade of final knowledge is the trademark of the Right. The Right doesn’t run on facts and analysis so much as conveying the impression of being divinely inspired in the face of geopolitical complexity. Their electoral strategy is to make the Left appear edgeless, unmanly and indecisive because the Right never leaves room for doubt: do it my way or we die.

It was a great campaign tactic back when “primaries” were resolved in cigar-lit backrooms, campaigns only lasted three months and the ballot only ever had two names.

But the binary arrangement has long been dissolved with the political decline of the two party system, the rise of PACs, corrupted campaign finance, the concentration of Executive privilege, K Street, and the proliferation of profitable cable news channels.

One might even say democracy, but I won’t take this to extremes.

So now we have some forty Republican Presidential candidates who will spend millions running several years on platforms that are 95% identical but all using basically the same rhetorical rulebook.

And the best part is that no one will pay attention to them while Trump is in the room.

They have grown desperate and loud.

So in what is a transparent attempt to ride in the relevancy rodeo, the Republican primary has provided the news media industry with a ready-made peanut gallery of panic jockeys, primed to provide bite-sized absurdities on fuck all to make mention in tomorrow’s headlines.

So while millions of American parents are afraid of sending their kids to school today because of weekly mass shootings, we are being told by fascist jellybeans like Chris Christie to fear three-year old war orphans or that we should be inspecting incoming refugees for stigmata.

As if virtually all terrorist mass shootings that have happened on American soil didn’t happen because of white American men.

As if American toddlers aren’t shooting their own mothers at Wal-mart.

As if we don’t have a backlog of long-suffering Christian war orphans from South and Central America already desperately seeking refugee status.

As if our treatment of the vulnerable isn’t the high watermark of our civilization.

And they’re pissing on it.

But I’ve seen this before.

And so have you.

Men like Chris Christie are the product of the antiquated Republican strategy of abusive fatherhood by proxy. They assume command without asking and answer for us years before they are elected. They presume that the American people are too fearful to entertain moral complexity and must, like children, be told instead what our national priorities will be.

Or we’ll die.

As citizens, we are being told the project of global civilization is not for us because our personal security hinges on the maintenance of empire.

With turgid blade-hands, men like Chris Christie cut through the muddy complexity of global terrorism to deliver with paternalistic certitude this American paradox: we are so great a nation that we somehow cannot shelter war orphans.

That as a Christian nation, we must be Christlike in suffering the poor to their lot.

That as brave Americans, we must be terrorized out of acting on behalf of humanity.

So, yeah, in the end, the civic garden we have planted has sprung for us many roses, like Chris Christie, who is basically saying we should kill babies in the name of national security.

I wish I was exaggerating, but I am not.

I apologize for us, rest of the world.

I’m trying.